Civil Codes lay out the rules and give legal effect to private relations, including economic relations, between legal persons within a jurisdiction. By 1990 the DPRK was one of the few countries in the world not to have one; its introduction followed the People’s Republic of China’s adoption of a civil code four years earlier in 1987, and may be taken as an intention to keep up with international norms in the field. But when it emerged, the contents of the DPRK Civil Code seem to have been influenced by the Soviet Union’s Civil Code of 1964, in focusing