René David

He worked on several legal projects and assignments, as in 1930 for UNIDROIT (International Institute for the Unification of Private Law) in Rome.

In the sixties, he led the French delegation at the UNCITRAL (United Nations Commission on International Trade Law) and from 1962 to 1978 he was a board member of UNIDROIT.

David, in Traité élémentaire de droit civile comparé,[1] proposed the classification of legal systems, according to the different ideology inspiring each one, into five groups or families: Especially with respect to the aggregating by David of the Romano-Germanic and Common Law into a single family, David argued that the antithesis between Common Law and Romano-German Laws, is of a technical rather than of an ideological nature.

The characteristics that he believed uniquely differentiate the Western legal family from the other four are: David was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Brussels, Ottawa, Basel, Leicester and Helsinki.

On September 17, 1976, he was honored with Amnesty International, with the Erasmus Prize in the Pieterskerk in Leiden.