Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

Chapter 11
The Development of Danish Joint Stock Company
Rules during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Inger Diibeck
The kings of Denmark became absolute monarchs in 1660. This absolutism
lasted until 1849, when a democratic constitution was adopted. Among the
first legislative initiatives of the newly established absolute king, Frederick
III, was the creation of a systematic corpus of Danish civil law, the so-called
Danish Code which was not finished until 1683, by which time his son had
succeeded him as Christian V. This code was the first real 'codification' in
Europe written in a national language, and it was admired as such by Jeremy
Bentham among others. 1 Many parts of the lawbook were simply taken from
older and often more or less antiquated medieval sources; some rules were
new. Very few were inspired by judge-made law or by legal practice. The
influence of Roman law and other foreign legal systems was small. The
lawbook was divided into six books: the first three dealt with procedural
law, legal regulations for the Danish church, rules about persons and family
relations and various secular problems. Book four dealt with maritime law
and book five with the law of property and contract as well as the law of
inheritance; book six was devoted to criminal law. The lawbook did not
address many commercial and industrial problems, which then had to be
regulated in other ways, for instance, by the grant of charters and privileges,
or by specific statutes. 2
The Danish Code was soon translated into Latin, German, English, Russian
and other languages and thus became quite well known in Europe. In
Denmark itself it was soon realized that many of the rules in the Code
were out of date and would have to be supplemented with new legislation as
developments in society called for changes. General rules on contracts, tort,
associations, companies, patents and unfair competition were to be found
neither in the lawbook nor in individual statutes until late in the nineteenth
century. But the lawbook stressed the modern view of freedom of contract
1
Jacques Vanderlinden, 'Code et codification dans la pens£e de Jeremy Bentham', Tijdschrift voor
Rechtsgeschiedenis, xxxii (1964), 45.
2
Inger Diibeck, 'Alt hvis politien egentlig vedkommer. . .'(The Relation between the Danish Code
and the So-called Police Order), Danske og Norske Lov i 300 Ar, Ditlev Tamm, ed. (Copenhagen, 1983),
145.