12 pr econtractual liability in european private law

professionals of comparative law. Somewhat more than a century ago, at the International Congress of Comparative Law in 1900 in Paris, early comparatists such as Lambert and Saleilles had quite explicit political goals. They promoted comparative law in the name of cosmopolitan, internationalist, humanist and socially progressive political visions.44 Moreover, the early comparatists meant comparative law to be applied: they promoted broad projects of unification and harmonisation of law. In contrast, later comparatists such as Schlesinger, Von Mehren, Zweigert and Ko¨tz adopted the professional project of mapping and explaining similarities and differences as an escape from the politics of ideology.45 However, Kennedy argues, the escape from politics remains a hope:46 ‘by holding firm to neutrality, continuing to the enumeration of similarities and differences, the profession is able to obscure the ongoing contribution it makes to global governance – but it does not eliminate it’.

B. The precontractual liability project

1. General

In 1996, during the yearly meeting of the Common Core group in Trento, the Contracts sub-group decided to dedicate a questionnaire to ‘precontractual liability’. The following year, the editors presented a questionnaire which was discussed and amended during a two-day discussion. After the approval from the general editors, the editors started the search for national reporters. Eventually, we found reporters for all the then Members States of the European Union except Belgium and Luxembourg, together with Norway and Switzerland.

In 2001, when we had received reports from all our reporters, the editors drafted a first comparative report and formulated specific questions to the reporters. The same year, the reporters and editors came together in Trento for a one-day meeting in order to discuss the first results. After the reporters had answered the questions from the editors, their reports were edited (with a view to clarity and uniform style) and sent back to the national reporters for checking and further revision. In the meantime the editors drafted the general conclusions. The work which is presented in this volume was therefore done over a number of years. Although some later materials have been added

44 Ibid. p. 134. 45 Ibid. p. 137. 46 Ibid. p. 138.