Egyptian Civil Code

The Egyptian Civil Code is the primary source of civil law in Egypt. Its first version was written in 1949 and ran to 1,149 articles, principally authored by the jurist Abd El-Razzak El-Sanhuri with assistance from Dean Edouard Lambert of the University of Lille, and it followed the French civil law model in regulating business and commerce while deliberately excluding family law and succession, which El-Sanhuri set apart from the Turkish civil tradition. Article 1 of the code directs a judge, in the absence of applicable legislation, to decide according to custom, then the principles of Islamic law, and failing those, according to natural law and the rules of equity, a provision one commentator has described as reflecting a hodgepodge of socialist doctrine and sociological jurisprudence.