Dear reader,

• Author: Raul Narits, Paul Varul
• Pages: 1-1

Dear reader,

The developments towards closer international integration that have taken place in the world over the past few decades have increased the dependency of different societies and countries on communication; more precisely on its efficiency and quality. Law also serves as a means of communication, and the role of law in communication along with how the law itself should be developed in changing situations, under the circumstances of greater social integration, are important issues.

Legal regulations depend on geographic, social, economic and other influences. Various international fora discussing the question of global legal integration have also raised the issue of regulatory communication developing on its basis.

The present issue of the journal mainly derives from the underlying ideas of two international fora held in Tartu. The fora focussed both on legal integration and topics of regulatory communication. The fora included the jubilee conference of Juridica International entitled European Legal Harmony: Goals and Milestones, held on 6 December 2005, and the symposium Regulatory Communication and Communication Structure in the Rule of Law, Global and Worldwide Domain, held on 21 April 2006. Several papers that have been published were also submitted independently of the fora.

The former of the above fora was dedicated to the harmonisation of private law, above all to contract law. Namely, contract law constitutes the core of the proposed European Civil Code. Harmonisation of law on the level of European Union secondary law has reached the stage in which the formulation of uniform provisions has brought about the development of advanced communication structures. Here we understand the structure of regulatory communication as a system of structured and organised relations, the objective of which is to create sets of harmonised regulatory provisions. The latter conference indicated that it was characteristic of jurisprudents to...