Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa - Volume 2, Issue 2, July 1969

Viewed in its entirety, there can be no doubt that the South African legal system with its large common law orientated areas deserves its classification as a hybrid system. However, one might ask oneself what factors really determine a system's classification. This is not the place to examine this question in depth, but taking the main continental systems as examples, one may be tempted to think that it is mainly the nature (concepts etc.) of their private, and possibly their criminal, law which determines their classification as civil law systems, rather than the comparatively new branches of public or commercial law.

The Rhodesian revolution offers a variation on this normal pattern because the revolutionaries did not oust the whole of the old order, but left the judiciary undisturbed and submitted their actions to the scrutiny and judgment of this same judiciary.

If the main object of the actual company law reform in France has been to give more rights to shareholders and to the general public, one must admit that, on the whole, the reformers have succeeded in many other respects too, especially in bringing about the codification of 1966. The Companies Act of that year certainly represents a landmark in French legal history.

The legal subject of a right is the bearer of the right; the legal object of a right is that property, material or immaterial, in respect of which the legal subject enjoys those privileges accorded him in terms of the right. It is in this latter sense that I have used the word ""object"" in the title of my lecture. Copyright may be defined as that right.

This is the first of a series of three papers. This paper deals with the legal effect of the Southern Rhodesia Act, 1965, passed by the British Parliament in response to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of the Rhodesian Ministers, and the Order in Council (S.l. 1952) authorized by the Act.

Great expectations of South Africa on the outcome of the Conference and its ability to ""legislate"" effectively are nourished.

In future, commercial law will, without any legislative measures being required in any country, have to be separated from the classical doctrine of Private International Law in such a way that the determination of the applicable national law is simultaneously accompanied by the search for a settlement which is within the framework of the freedom of contract based upon transnational rules of a bi-national or multi-national kind. Such a procedure has the great advantage that it can be applied with equal ease by arbiters and state-employed judges.