Sheryl Sinkow

The Rwandan government wants to adopt an American style code of contract law based on common law, and Cornell's Robert Summers, right, and Georgetown's Don Wallace, center, are co-drafting it for the African nation. Muna Ndulo, left, is serving as an adviser on the project.

The government of Rwanda wants to adopt an American style code of contract law based on common law, and a Cornell professor of law is going to help draft it.

Robert S. Summers, Cornell's W.G. McRoberts Professor in the Administration of Law, is principal co-drafter of a new code of contract law for the African nation, which is still struggling to recover from a genocidal war in the early 1990s that left an estimated 800,000 of its people dead, most of them members of the minority Tutsi tribe.

"We're not starting from scratch," said Summers, who will co-draft the law with Professor Don Wallace Jr. of Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C. "We'll be drawing heavily on various provisions of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts prepared by the American Law Institute."

The "restatement" is an authoritative formulation of American contract law, the branch of common law that governs written and other agreements and is used to resolve legal disputes.

The Rwandan government selected Summers partly for his past work as an adviser on draft revisions to the Russian Civil Code and the Egyptian Civil Code. But this is the first time he has been asked to work on common law. Summers also was chosen because of his work co-authoring (with James J. White, University of Michigan) the four volumes of "The Uniform Commercial Code" (UCC), the most-cited treatise on the code by courts and scholars in the United States. UCC Articles One and Two, which apply to sales, are also being adapted to a limited extent to suit the new Rwandan contract law.

In addition to White, Robert Hillman and Muna Ndulo, both Cornell professors of law, also are serving as advisers on the Rwandan project. Ndulo formerly served as dean at the University of Zambia law school. On the Rwandan side, Richard Mugisha, chairman of the Ministry of Justice Reform Cell, is responsible for the project.

Rwanda currently lacks a comprehensive set of civil laws and wants "to start with a clean slate," said Summers. The country is abandoning prior structures of civil law that, because of its past history as a Belgian colony, were heavily influenced by French jurisprudence.

"The main reason the Rwandan ministry came to the U.S. is that they wanted a common law code as opposed to the European codes, which are very abstract and general," said Summers, adding that he is confident the Rwandan parliament will adopt the law code after revisions. This could have a significant impact on the region, says Ndulo.

"This work is a major contribution to Rwanda's rebuilding effort -- they have no contractual code at this point," said Ndulo. "They need to rebuild their economy, and to be able to do that they need to rebuild their legal infrastructure."

Once in place, he said, Rwanda's common law could serve as a model for the country's neighbors, Uganda and Tanzania, which also lack comprehensive contract codes. Summers said a draft should be ready by the end of this year, though revisions will certainly take longer.

Also working on the project are Cornell law students: Jeff Buchholz, Arnab Chaudhuri, Allison Donohue, Michael Fornasiero and Rose Stella, all Class of 2007; and Jonathan Grossberg, Yosef Ibrahimi and Amanda Klopf, all Class of 2008.