The second lecture in the cycle dedicated to the Serbian Civil Code and Jovan Hadžić was given by our dean, Prof. Dr Zoran Mirković, on the 15^th of November, 2019. The title of the lecture was “ Preliminary Provisions and Implementation of the Serbian Civil Code”; Prof. Mirković focused on the first part of the preliminary provisions of this Code, which, at a glance, show enough of a resemblance to the preliminary articles of the Austrian Civil Code to lead most commentators to the conclusion that they were simply taken from there, while, in fact, they demonstrate quite a lot of distinctiveness and originality. Prof. Mirković connected the analysis of the articles with a depiction of the specific circumstances in which the Code was adopted, such as the mass illiteracy of the Serbian judges at the time, or the fact that a capitulation regime was still applied to foreign nationals in Serbian territories, seeing how Serbia was still a part of the Ottoman Empire. That way, he demonstrated that Jovan Hadžić had very particular motives to introduce certain solutions which may seem unusual (e.g. norms formulated in a way that seems to suggest a personal principle in the application of law), or, at the very least, deviating from their Austrian model (e.g. introducing custom as a subsidiary source of law). He also explained what the implementation of this Code must have been like, seeing how it was a turning point in the development of Serbian law. The audience followed the lecture with great interest, with a rich discussion developing at the end.