rather bore certain characteristics of a restatement, for they were supposed to incorporate and consolidate ‘the legal achievement of centuries’.39 Windscheid also metaphorically described a codification as ‘no more than a moment in the development …merely a ripple in the stream’.40 It was the product of a legal tradition largely shaped by courts and legal scholarship, and it thus provided a statutory framework for the further development of the law by courts and legal writers. A codification did not ossify the law, nor did it constitute, as was sometimes feared, a prison cell.41 The question of whether a unilateral release should be recognized is still with us today, and can arguably receive a satisfactory answer despite § 397BGB. Sometimes the discussion has been deflected. Since the BGBdoes not recognize either undue influence or metus reverentialis, the courts had to use § 138 (1) BGBas a stopgap for the suretyship cases. That said, once they had entered into force the codifications came to be regarded as comprehensive and closed systems of legal rules, constituting autonomous interpretational spaces. After all, they were a piece of legislation, enacted by the legislature of a specific state and applicable onlywithin that specific state.Theymoved to centre stage in the law faculties and became autonomous subjects of research and teaching, causing a rather inward-looking scholarship. This was to lead to the horizontal andvertical isolation of law and legal scholarship with which we are faced today.42 French or English textbooks and court decisions appear to be as irrelevant to the modern German lawyer as the literature of the ius commune. part v • comparative legal history • reinhard zimmermann 242 39 Bernhard Windscheid, ‘Die geschichtliche Schule der Rechtswissenschaft’, in Paul Oertmann (ed.), Bernhard Windscheid: Gesammelte Reden und Abhandlungen(Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1904), 75. 40 Windscheid 1904, 75–6. 41 For theBGB, see Reinhard Zimmermann, ‘Das bürgerliche Gesetzbuch und die Entwicklung des bürgerlichen Rechts’, in Mathias Schmoeckel, Joachim Rückert, and Reinhard Zimmermann (eds.), Historisch-kritischer Kommentar zumBGB, i (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 42 See Zimmermann 1996, 1–52.
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