The New German Law of Obligations: Historical and Comparative PerspectivesOn 1 January 2000 the German Civil Code (BGB) became one hundred years old. It had been remarkably resilient throughout a century marked by catastrophic upheavals and a succession of fundamentally different political regimes. Two years later, however, the most sweeping individual reform ever to have affected the Code entered into force. This was the Modernization of the Law of Obligations Act: triggered by the necessity to implement the European