62 Stability

There is one aspect of efficiency and security which deserves separate mention because it lay, consciously or subconsciously, behind many of the debates on the model rules and because it accounts for an overwhelming part of the actual shape and content of the DCFR. It is stability. People feel more secure with solutions which are familiar, tried, tested and traditional. Other things being more or less equal, such solutions also promote efficiency because there is no need to understand new rules and work out all their possible implications. A valuable store of knowledge and experience is not wasted. This aspect of security and efficiency seems to be particularly valued in the legal sphere. There is a story of a famous judge of a former era who addressed a large and distinguished audience for a full hour and then said at the end, with perfect sincerity, ‘I hope I have said nothing new.’ We would not go quite so far. But we hope and believe that there is much in the DCFR which will indeed be perfectly familiar to private lawyers from every part of Europe. We hope that no lawyer from any part of Europe will see it as an alien product but that all will see it as growing out of a shared tradition and a shared legal culture. It is our great good fortune that that legal culture, thanks to the work of many legal thinkers from many countries over many centuries, is strongly imbued with the principles of freedom, security, justice and efficiency.