Sébastien, can you tell us more about the work in the Royal Commission on the New Civil Code, and at which stage the legislative process is?

Sure! So Belgium has been rewriting its entire private law since around 2016. Until very recently, the Code Napoleon of 1804 was still in force in Belgium. That doesn't mean the legislature did nothing in the meantime, but important parts of private law, like property law, contract law, tort law and so on, remained largely untouched.

In 2016, after the successful reform of the law of obligations in France, the calls for reform grew louder in Belgium too. The Minister of Justice took the initiative to draft a brand new Civil Code. Several reform commissions were set up, each made up of professors, and each commission was given a domain with the task of drafting both the legal provisions and the explanatory memorandum. A number of these commissions have already finished their work, so that subject matter is already regulated in the new Civil Code and even already in force, like property law, the general law of obligations, and tort law.

I myself was appointed to the commission tasked with reforming the law of specific contracts, which is meant to become Book 7 of the new Civil Code, covering things like sale, lease, service contracts, mandate, and settlement. We held our first meeting in early 2022, and a little over 35 meetings later, our draft was ready. As with the other parts of the new Civil Code, our draft was submitted to a public online consultation, where everyone got the chance to send in comments: lawyers, judges, bailiffs, fellow academics, stakeholders like consumer organisations and the construction sector, and even alert citizens sent in remarks. We adjusted our draft in light of that and submitted it to Parliament on 20 February 2025, where the parliamentary committee held hearings again with stakeholders, representatives of interest groups, and fellow professors, who once again went through the draft and formulated comments. Based on that, months of conversations with the political parties of the federal government followed, where we had to explain the scope of provisions to members of parliament and put proposed changes from stakeholders and interest groups into a broader context. As a result of these hearings and conversation, we drafted a bit more than 75 amendments.

Honestly, watching the parliamentary process keeps you humble: a provision you're rather proud of can get amended, or a comment by a stakeholder can convince a member of parliament to change course. Very recently, on 9 June 2026, our draft for the new law of specific contracts was adopted in first reading by the competent parliamentary committee. In all likelihood, a plenary vote will take place around mid-July, just before the summer recess. So hopefully, good times for contract lawyers are ahead!

What are the most important legal changes that the Civil code brings about? Can you give us a couple of examples? Do you think there are specific areas in which not only experts, but also citizens, will actually experience a difference?

A lot of it is "tidying up": removing rules that nobody actually used anymore, or that case law had quietly replaced decades ago. On the other hand, there's also codification of rules that case law had developed but that you wouldn't find anywhere in the Code. Just imagine, these provisions have been the subject of more than 200 years of case law, so there's a substantial body of judgments that has further shaped the scope of these rules. A lot of that now gets an explicit place in the Code itself, which avoids transaction costs, because lawyers and judges no longer have to dig through handbooks or case law overviews to figure out what the courts had actually developed. At the same time, we want to make private law more accessible for ordinary citizens too, people without a legal background, who can now more easily find an answer in the statutory text itself, which we've tried to formulate as simply as possible.

On top of that, we wanted to simplify the new law of specific contracts, which also helps reduce transaction costs. We've tried to cut back on excess complexity, for instance by drastically simplifying the rules on sale and aligning them with consumer sales law, a trend you can also see, for example, in the Netherlands and Germany in their own reforms of the law of sale.

At the same time, we wanted to modernise. The economy of today isn't the economy of 1804. Back then, the legislature assumed that certain contracts were entered into as a favour between friends, which means the legal framework was no longer in step with the times. That's the case, for instance, for deposit and mandate contracts. Today, though, these contracts play a much more prominent role in our economy, where some people have actually made a job out of representing someone else. Think of someone managing your affairs, your real estate agent, anyone acting on your behalf, used to be presumed unpaid unless you said otherwise, a rule going back to Roman law and the idea that doing someone a favour shouldn't be billed for. We've flipped that. Today, if a professional acts for you, payment is the default. That simply fits much better with how people actually do business today than with how the Romans did business two thousand years ago.

The modernisation isn't purely technical either, it really does affect the legal position of millions of citizens. Think of someone buying a house, and after a few months, when winter comes and the heating gets switched on, it turns out the heating doesn't work. Under the old Code, the buyer in such a case of a hidden defect only had a claim for termination of the contract or a price reduction, but in one actual case the buyer wanted the seller to repair or replace the heating instead. Well, the Supreme Court stuck strictly to the remedies listed in that statutory provision, and so refused repair or replacement: the buyer could only ask for termination (handing back the house against repayment of the price) or a price reduction. In our draft, we make it possible for the buyer to ask for repair or replacement instead. That's a much more modern solution, certainly in light of sustainability concerns, since it means a defective good could also simply be fixed.

Your work in the Commission has also led to you taking up the gigantic task to write a new commentary on the Civil code. How did your work on the Civil Code reform commission, including the ongoing political discussions in the parliament, influence the way you approached this book?

The book deals with obligations, which is one of the most fundamental legal concepts in private law. It structures the legal relationship between creditor and debtor, and forms one of the quiet but crucial architectures of our legal system. This book was conceived from that central position of the concept of obligation.

The biggest challenge in my writing process was finding the right balance: the balance between thoroughness and accessibility, but also the balance between the old law and the new law of obligations. Here I made the somewhat radical choice to start from the law of obligations as it's actually laid down in the new Civil Code. That doesn't mean the old law has been pushed entirely into the past. On the contrary, on many points the case law and scholarship developed under the old law remain relevant for understanding the true meaning of the new provisions. The legislature also drew inspiration from foreign codes for several provisions of the Civil Code, and wherever that's the case, I devote attention to comparative law insights, drawing on foreign case law and scholarship, in an attempt to contribute to a better understanding of the scope of these new provisions. In doing so, my teaching assignment at the University of Amsterdam has also left its mark on the book in that respect. Teaching foreign law forces you into a constant exercise in comparison: why does a legislature choose this solution rather than that one, and what balancing of interests underlies that choice? Those questions also shaped my writing process.

In what way did your engagement with lawmakers during the reform project influence your view on the relationship between scholarship and “real-world impact”?

It made that relationship a lot less abstract for me. As an academic, you're used to your work feeding into the world indirectly: a court reads an article, a footnote nudges a judgment, that sort of slow osmosis. And sometimes, if you're lucky, you get to shift one small stone in the river, for instance because a judge follows the view your scholarship had been advocating.

Sitting in a reform commission is the opposite experience. Suddenly you're holding the pen for what will soon become statutory provisions, and not in some fragmentary way, but while drawing up an entire framework. That's incredibly motivating, but it also comes with responsibility: these provisions will soon govern the lives of millions of people, maybe very quietly, without them even realising it, but think about how many sales contracts get concluded every single day. I've come to appreciate just how much legitimacy matters in this process. Am I happy with everything in our draft? No, of course not. If you could start with a completely blank page, you might want to shape certain things differently. That's tempting, obviously, but a good idea on paper still needs broad support from practitioners, judges, notaries, and eventually elected politicians, before it can become law, which is exactly why our public consultation mattered so much, and why the bill changed in response to it. If anything, this whole project convinced me that legal scholars shouldn't just write for the legislature from a distance. Getting genuinely involved, with all the compromises that involves, is where some humbling academic work happens.

There's another challenge I experienced as one of the most important: a statutory provision also has to be able to stand the test of time. As an academic, you often have the tendency to criticise the legislature: the provision is incomplete, too general, not concrete enough, too open ended. And yes, at the start of our work I also had the tendency to formulate things as precisely and as extensively as possible. In the meantime, I've become a lot milder about that. You have to look for a provision that's concrete enough to give real guidance to practice, but that's at the same time open enough to absorb societal developments and keep working for many years, decades, maybe even centuries. Who knows what our society will look like in the year 2225? At that point, you should leave enough leeway for case law and scholarship to give new meaning to that provision. This balance requires trust in both the courts and in legal scholarship. And those are precisely the things that sometimes seem to be under pressure these days. That's an important task for us as lawyers.