part vi • european legal integration • pia letto-vanamo Since the establishment of the German Constitutional Court in 1951, constitutional courts have been founded not only in Europe but elsewhere.7 For instance, there is a strong ‘German-style’ constitutional court in Seoul in South Korea, and another in Bogotá in Columbia. For their part, the constitutional courts are witnessing a strong global trend: the constitutionalization of the law. Moreover, there is an epistemic community of constitutional law judges worldwide. In Bogotá, capital of a corrupt country with a relatively new constitution, I found constitutional court judges who see themselves as the guardians of the Colombian people’s constitutional rights. Interestingly, in judgements these same judges not only refer to the Colombian Constitution but also actively discuss constitutional principles. Never before my Columbian visit had I heard so much about Robert Alexy’s thinking on constitutional law. All of his major works have been translated from German to Spanish, and his theoretical and practical impact has been huge. Thus, we can find European legal thinking – even European legal subcultures – almost everywhere. It has impact because of institutions, because of scholarly and personal networks, and because of learning across borders. The second (Europeanizing) legal institution is the other thing that does not exist in the Nordic countries – the civil code. In fact, while many European harmonization projects have failed, a counter-movement has furthered the harmonization of national private law orders. In today’s Europe, there are hardly any countries without a civil code. Every summer, while lecturing at the Salzburg Summer School of European Private Law, I hear colleagues from some thirty countries start their classes with a ‘credo’ of the civil code of the country concerned. The existence of a civil code seems especially important to professors and students from Eastern or Central European universities. The most successful in the competition between European models have been the civil codes of Germany (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB) and Switzerland (Schweizerisches Zivilgesetzbuch, ZGB). You can see the similarities in national legal rules 7 Michael Stolleis (ed.), Herzkammern der Republik: Die deutschen und das Bundesverfassungsgericht (Munich: Beck 2015). 282
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