THE CONCEPT OF ‘BARGAIN’ AND THE (UN-)BRIDGEABLE GULF BETWEEN COMMON LAW AND CIVIL LAW. SOME HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE EUROPEANIZATION OF THE LAW OF CONTRACT

The essay focuses, from a dogmatic and historical perspective, on the general problem of Europeanization of Contract Law: after a short analysis of the lacunae that characterize the DCFR (the contents of which are considered as a good chance to deal with the theoretical possibility of interpreting law as a natural and spontaneous order or as an artificial system), it is intended to examine the structural and historical divide existing between Common Law and Civil Law (above all with regard to the Anglo-Saxon legal features of ‘consideration’, ‘bargain’ and ‘unilateral contracts’, compared with the homologous continental institutes). Then, the essay, in the light of the outcomes achieved by the Roman iurisprudentia, aims at showing new avenues towards the goal of a unified Contract Law. Finally it treats the importance of the creation of a new legal science that, by the means of an innovative conceptual apparatus, can face all the legal matters involved in the protean current reality: indeed, a reality where the present seems to be really ‘out-of-date’ and the past potentially ‘up-to-date’.