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Are civilians educable?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Pierre Legrand
Pierre Legrand*
Affiliation:
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
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Extract

All the efforts of human reason tend to the elimination of [the other]. The other does not exist: such is rational faith, the incurable belief of human reason. Identity = reality, as if, in the end, everything must absolutely and necessarily be one and the same. But, the other refuses to disappear: it subsists, it persists; it is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth. [There is] what might be called the incurable otherness from which oneness must always suffer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 216 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 1998

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Footnotes

*

I am most grateful to Linda Rae Legault who helped to frame the thesis and enhance its legibility. I am also indebted to Hugh Beale for generously inviting me to address the 1997 edition of the Annual Conference of the Society of Public Teachers of Law in Wanvick, where I presented an early version of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies. Translations are mine.

References

1. A Machado ‘Juan de Mairena - Sentencias, donaires, apuntes y recuerdos de un profesor apórifo’ in Poesía y prosa (ed O Macrì) t IV: Prosas completas (1936–39) (Madrid Espasa-Calpe [1989]) II, p 1917 [‘De lo uno a lo otro…Todo el trabajo de la razón humana tiende a la eliminación del segundo término. Lo otro no existe: tal es la fe racional, la incurable creencia de la razón humana. Identidad = realidad, como si, a fin de cuentas, todo hubiera de ser, absoluta y necesariamente, uno y lo mismo. Pero lo otro no se deja eliminar: subsiste, persiste; es el hueso duro de roer en que la razón se deja los dientes… como si dijéramas en la incurable otredad que padece lo uno.’; emphasis original].

2. For an argument explaining the necessity of evaluating the merits of a tradition in the light of its own ambitions, see MacIntyre, A Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990) p 181 Google Scholar.

3. Schulz, F Principles of Roman Law (trans M Wolff) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936) p 41 Google Scholar.

4. For the intellectual affinity between Tribonian and Gaius, see Honoré, T Tribonian (London: Duckworth, 1978) p 211 Google Scholar: ‘Tribonian admired and did his best to copy Gaius' principle of setting the law in its historical context and of stating it in as simple and systematic a form as he could’.

5. Schulz, F History of Roman Legal Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946) p 290 Google Scholar. See generally Stein, P ‘The Development of the Institutional System’ in Stein, P G and Lewis, A D E (eds) Studies in Justinian's Institutes in Memory of J.A.C. Thomas (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1983) pp 151–163 Google Scholar; P G Stein ‘The Quest for a Systematic Civil Law’ (1996) Proceedings of the British Academy pp 148–153 (hereinafter ‘Systematic Civil Law’); Schulz (above n 3) pp 40–82; Wieacker, F Römische Rechtsgeschichte (Munich Beck, 1988) pp 618–639 Google Scholar. Cf Goudy, Henry Trichotomy in Roman Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910)Google Scholar. For a reflection on the ‘block effect’ of Roman law, see Watson, A The Making of the Civil Law (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981) pp 14–22 Google Scholar.

6. Schulz (above n 3) pp 117, 116–17, and 118, respectively.

7. Ibid, p 113.

8. Weber, M Economy and Society (ed Roth, G and Wittich, C, trans E Fischoff et al t II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) p 854 Google Scholar (originally published posthumously in German in 1922).

9. Eg T Murphy The Oldest Social Science? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) p 10: ‘Law developed an understanding of the character of the relationship between ruler and ruled, and thus of its mode of action, drawn largely from core elements of the emergent Christian tradition. Conversely, the Christian Church developed its institutions and conceptions of law and government modelled largely on existing Roman practices’. I explore certain key continuities between the spiritual and temporal realms in my ‘Antiqui juris civilis fabulas’ (1995) 45 v Toronto LJ 311.

10. ‘Instead of “craving for generality” I could also have said “the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case”’: Wittgenstein, L ‘The Blue Book’ in The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1969) p 18 Google Scholar (based on lectures delivered in 1933–34).

11. For a brief overview, see Kelley, D R ‘Gaius Noster: Substructures of Western Social Thought’ (1979) 84 American Historical Review 619 at 629–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. G W Leibniz Nova Methodus discendae docendaeque Jurisprudentiae, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (ed Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR) t VI, vol 1: Philosophische Schrifren (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1990) pp 293–364. The quotation is from Grua, G La justice humaine selon Leibniz (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956) p 254 Google Scholar. See generally Riley, P Leibniz Universal Jurisprudence (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Leibniz (above n 12) II § 28 p 314.Google Scholar

14. Lilla, M G.B. Vico (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993) p 9 Google Scholar.

15. Pollock, F ‘The History of Comparative Jurisprudence’ in Essays in the Law (London: Macmillan, 1922) pp 23–24 Google Scholar (originally written in 1903).

16. Ibid pp 100–101.

17. Kelley (above n 11) p 639. For Domat's use of the phrase, see J Domat Les loix civiles dans leur ordre naturel (ed de Hericourt) t I (Paris: Nyon, 1777) liv prélim, tit I, sec 2, I, p 8 (originally published in 1689).

18. See Weber (above n 8) pp 873–75.

19. L Josserand ‘Conception générale du droit comparé’ in Congrès international de droit comparé Procès-verbaux des séances et documents t I (Paris: LGDJ, 1905) p 243 (hereinafter ‘Procès-verbaux’)..

20. [R] Saleilles ‘Conception et objet de la science du droit compareè’ in Procès-verbaux (above n 19) p 181.

21. [E] Lambert [‘Rapport’] in Procès-verbaux (above n 19) p 39.

22. Lévy-Ullmann, H Vers le droit mondial du XXe siècle (Paris: Rousseau, 1923)Google Scholar. This short book had first appeared as a foreword to the doctoral thesis of Lepaulle, P De la condition des sociétés étrangères aux Etats-Unis d'Amérique (Paris: Rousseau, 1923)Google Scholar.

23. Demogue, R L'unification internationale du droit privé (Paris: Rousseau, 1927) p 20 Google Scholar.

24. Capitant, H ‘Un projet de Code international des obligations et des contrats’ in Académie Royale de Belgique Extrait des Bulletins de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques (Brussels: Marcel Hayez, 1928) p 199 Google Scholar.

25. Delmas-Marty, M Vers un droit commun de l'humanité (Paris: Textuel, 1996) p 107 Google Scholar.

26. Basedow, J ‘A Common Contract Law for the Common Market’ (1996) 33 CMLR 1169; Schulze, R ‘Allgemeine Rechtsgrundsätze und europäisches Privatrecht’ (1993) 1 Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht 442.Google Scholar

27. Kötz, H Europäisches Vertragsrecht t I (Tübingen: Mohr, 1996)Google Scholar; von Bar, C Gemeineuropäisches Deliktsrecht t I (Munich: Beck, 1996)Google Scholar.

28. Storme, M ‘General Introductory Report’ in Storme, M (ed) Rapprochement du droit judiciaire de l'Union européenne/Approximation of Judiciary Law in the European Union (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1994) pp 37–70 Google Scholar.

29. Lando, O ‘Principles of European Contract Law’ (1992) 56 Rabels Z 261.Google Scholar

30. Gandolfi, G ‘Per la redazione di un “codice europeo dei contratti”’ [1995] Rivista trimestrale di diritto e procedura civile 1074.Google Scholar

31. Mattei, U and Bussani, M ‘In Search of the Common Core of European Private Law’ (1994) 2 European Review of Private Law 485.Google Scholar

32. vanGerven, W ‘Casebooks for the Common Law of Europe’ (1996) 4 European Review of Private Law 67.Google Scholar

33. Merryman, J H and Clark, D S Comparative Law: Western European and Latin American Legal Systems: Cases and Materials (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978) pp 104–105 Google Scholar. The current version of this statement has been shortened; see Merryman, J H, Clark, D S and Haley, J O The Civil Law Tradition: Europe, Latin America, and East Asia (Charlottesville: Michie, 1994) p 325 Google Scholar.

34. Foley, M The Silence of Constitutions (London: Routledge, 1989) p 114 Google Scholar.

35. Murphy (above n 9) p 85.

36. I adopt and adapt Gigerenzer, G et al The Empire of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p 290 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. T Weir ‘The Common Law System’ in International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, t II: The Legal Systems of the World: Their Comparison and Unification, ch 2: Structure and the Divisions of the Law (ed R David) (Tübingen: Mohr [nd]) No 82, p 77.

38. [1995] 2 AC 207 at 268, HL.

39. Ibid at 293.

40. R v Deputy Governor of Camphill Prison, ex parte King [1984] 3 All ER 897 at 903, CA.

41. [1947] AC 156 at 175, HL. The reference is, of course, to Holmes, Oliver Wendell The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881) p 1 Google Scholar. See also Quinn v Leathem [1901] AC 495 at 506, HL (Lord Halsbury LC); Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562 at 579, HL (Lord Atkin); Masterson v Holden [1986] 3 All ER 39 at 43, QB (Glidewell LJ).

42. Re T(a minor) [1997] 1 All ER 906 at 917, CA.

43. Stein, P G ‘Roman Law, Common Law, and Civil Law’ (1992) 66 Tulane LR 1591 at 1601.Google Scholar

44. Grotius De jure belli ac pacis (trans F W Kelsey) t II (New York, 1964) proleg, § 58 p 30 [originally published in Latin in 1625].

45. Domat (above n 17) pref, p [4]. The original text reads as follows: ‘comme les Arrêts ne sont rendus que sur des différens particuliers, & qu'ils ne sont pas en forme de Réglemens, on ne laisse pas de faire renaître les mêmes questions, sous prétexte que les Arrêts peuvent être rendus dans des circonstances particulieres … On ne fait ici cette remarque que par occasion … & seulement pour faire voir que ces sortes de dificultés ayant besoin d'autant de regles, il seroit à souhaiter qu'il y fût pourvu par des regles fixes & uniformes.’.

46. Stein ‘Systematic Civil Law’ (above n 5) pp 162 and 159, respectively.

47. In the process, ‘the Community [is presented] as a juristic idea; the written constitution as a sacred text; the professional commentary as a legal truth; the case law as the inevitable working out of the correct implications of the constitutional text; and the constitutional court as the disembodied voice of right reason and constitutional teleology’: M Shapiro ‘Comparative Law and Comparative Politics’ (1980) 53 Southern Calif LR 537 at 538 (commenting on A Barav ‘The Judicial Power of the European Economic Community’ (1980) 53 Southern Calif LR 461).

48. Resolution [of the European Parliament] on Action to Bring into Line the Private Law of the Member States, OJ 1989 C 158/400 (26 May 1989); Resolution [of the European Parliament] on the Harmonization of Certain Sectors of the Private Law of the Member States, OJ 1994 C 205/518 (6 May 1994).

49. See my ‘European Legal Systems Are Not Converging’ (1996) 45 ICLQ 52; ‘Uniformity, Legal Traditions, and Law's Limits’ [1996] Juridisk Tidskrift 306; ‘Against a European Civil Code’ (1997) 60 MLR 44. But cf J Bell ‘English Law and French Law - Not So Different?’ in (1995) CLP 63–101. See generally Samuel, G The Foundations of Legal Reasoning ([Antwerp]: Maklu, 1994) pp 155–288 Google Scholar.

50. Murphy (above n 9) p 56.

51. Pizzorusso, A ‘The Law-Making Process as a Juridical and Political Activity’ in Pizzorusso, A (ed) Law in the Making (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1988) p 42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The reference to the European Court of Human Rights decision is to the Sunday Times case: Times Newspapers Ltd v United Kingdom, European Court of Human Rights, 1979, Series A, No 30 (judgment of 26 April 1979).

52. R Zimmermann ‘Statuta sunt stricte inrerpretanda? Statutes and the Common Law: A Continental Perspective’ (1997) 56 CLJ 315 at 321, 326 and 328, respectively. As a German academic asserts such antiparticularism, he is giving effect to the nineteenth-century view that ‘[o]nly by transcending what distinguished Swabia from Prussia, or Bavaria from Schleswig-Holstein, could Germany become, in law as in ideology, one’. This quotation is from Murphy (above n 9) p 44, n 22. For a further illustration of strong German ethnocentrism, see R Zimmermann ‘Savigny's Legacy: Legal History, Comparative Law, and the Emergence of a European Legal Science’ (1996) 112 LQR 576, where the author goes so far as to suggest as an inspirational model for European academics a law professor whose nationalistic historicism was always inimical to comparative legal studies, as underlined in Landsberg, E Geschichte der Deutschen Rechtswissenschaft t III vol 2 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1910) pp 207–217 Google Scholar, and whose abiding commitment lay with the institution of a Romanist Rechtsstaat in Germany, as shown in Whitman, J Q The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For general evidence supporting the view that German academics tend to address European matters as if German history was repeating itself, see Laughland, J The Tainted Source (London: Little, Brown, 1997) pp 22–23, 26, 31–33, 110–11, 116–17, 120 and 137Google Scholar.

53. Cultural totalitarianism need not be structured by the interactive dynamics of antagonism. It may be prompted, for instance, by the fear of a loss of identity. Anthony Giddens's theory of subjectivity provides a helpful explanatory framework in this respect. For Giddens, action and interaction operate on three layers: discursive consciousness (what is verbalised or easily verbalisable), practical consciousness (the habitual, routinised background awareness on the fringe of consciousness and not itself the focus of discursive attention) and the ‘basic security system’ (the unconscious experience or motivation intervening at the basic level of identity security); see Giddens, A The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984)Google Scholar. In my experience, most civilians do not vocally express the view that the civil law is ‘better’ than the common law and, for this reason, that the common law must be replaced by a civil-law logic within the European Community. The situation differs, however, at the other two levels and easily translates itself into condescending or avoidance behaviour on the part of civilians vis-à-vis common law lawyers as when a German colleague volunteers the opinion - a statement which I overheard on the occasion of a seminar at a Dutch university on 8 September 1997 - that the common law is only suited to rural conditions! Typically, such manifestation of impudence is experienced in silence by common law lawyers themselves and by comparatists-as-observers. ‘Good academic manners’ (at least on this side of the Atlantic) suggest that it is indecorous and tactless to call attention to this form of interaction. In fact, to bring to discursive consciousness a type of behaviour that is occurring at the level of practical consciousness or in terms of the basic security system - that is, to follow a strategy of consciousness raising - is liable to lead to accusations of overreaction and misperception of the situation, if not to attempts at silencing.

54. I do not defend an essentialist understanding of ‘identity’, and I accept that an ‘overlapping’ otherness is possible. For a range of rewarding reflections on the theme of incommensurability, see Berlin, I ‘“From Hope and Fear Set Free”’ in Hardy, H and Hausheer, R (eds) The Proper Study of Mankind (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997) pp 91–118 (originally published in 1964)Google Scholar; I Berlin ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’ (ibid) pp 359–435 (originally published in 1965); I Berlin ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ (ibid) pp 243–68 (originally published in 1973); Taylor, C Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp 230–247 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, B Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) pp 71–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raz, J The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) pp 321–366 Google Scholar; Kekes, J The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) pp 53–75 Google Scholar; Griffin, J Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) pp 75–92 Google ScholarPubMed.

55. Bernstein, R J The New Constellation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) p 74 Google Scholar.

56. Murphy (above n 9) p 91, n 36. For a thoughtful outline of what he calls ‘the distinctive constitutional psychology of the British people’, see P Allott ‘The Crisis of European Constitutionalism: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe’ (1997) 34 CMLR 439 at 449–451.

57. Herrnstein Smith, B Belief and Resistance (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997) p 68 Google Scholar.

58. Cf Marion Young, I Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) p 59 Google Scholar: ‘Cultural imperialism involves the universalization of a dominant group's experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm.’.

59. Postema, G J Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) pp 73–74 Google Scholar (emphasis original). Cf Burke, E Reflections on the Revolution in France (ed C Cruise O'Brien) (London: Penguin, 1968) p 120 Google Scholar: ‘[I]n what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars’ (originally published in 1790).

60. This designation was suggested in [F] d'Olivier De la réforme des loix civiles t I (Paris: Merigot, 1786) p 273, where the author defends the adoption of a universal civil code. Nowadays, the idea of a European codification is no longer limited to the realm of ‘private law’. For an argument supporting a European code of administrative law, see Schwarze, J ‘L'européanisation du droit administratif national’ in Schwarze, J (ed) Le droit administratif sous l'influence de l'Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996) p 844 Google Scholar.

61. Merryman, J H ‘On the Convergence (and Divergence) of the Civil Law and the Common Law’ in Cappelletti, M (ed) New Perspectives for a Common Law of Europe (Leyden: Sijthoff, 1978) p 232 Google Scholar (my emphasis).

62. Eg Goodrich, P Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar. I reviewed this consequential book in (1996) 55 CLJ 372.

63. Although I am here focusing on scholarly attitudes in the civil law world, I would not wish to suggest that academics writing in common law jurisdictions can not also trivialise the specificity of another legal community's experience by reducing it to their own cognitive categories. For a manifest expulsion of the values of humility and deference from the relational framework between observer and observed showing the observer to be more interested in the assertion of his own author-ity than in the pursuit of ethical communicative action, see Dannemann, G and Markesinis, B ‘The Legacy of History on German Contract Law’ in Cranston, R (ed) Making Commercial Law: Essays in Honour of Roy Goode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) p 2 Google Scholar: ‘one must…“anglicize” German law in order to make it more palatable to an English readership’. For general reflections on the necessity of attending to alterity within the communicative and subsequent re-presentational process, see L Thomas ‘Moral Deference’ (1992) 24 Philosophical Forum 233; I Marion Young ‘Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought’ (1997) 3 Constellations 340 at 362, n11. For a noteworthy attempt to combat the degradation of communication and elucidate a language of comparison suitably respectful of the rich texture of indigenous experiences of law which would avoid any assertion of ‘ownership’ over them by the comparatist, see J E Ainsworth ‘Categories and Culture: On the “Rectification of Names” in Comparative Law’ (1996) 82 Cornell LR 19.

64. Adorno, T W Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973) p 311 Google Scholar (originally published in German in 1966).

65. Foucault, M L'usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) p 14 Google Scholar ‘(se déprendre de soimême’). For an incisive reflection on the difficulty of thinking ‘otherwise’, see Borges, J L ‘La langue analytique de John Wilkins’ in Bernès, J-P (ed) Oeuvres complètes t I (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) p 749 Google Scholar (originally published in Spanish in 1952).

66. Merryman notes that the attitude of the civilian believing (and needing to believe) in his superiority vis-à-vis other legal traditions has ‘itself become part of the civil law tradition’: Merryman, J H The Civil Law Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2nd edn, 1985) p 3 Google Scholar.

67. Oakeshott, M Rationalism in Politics (London: p, 1962) p 32 Google Scholar. For a recent observation to the same effect, see Smith, (above n 57) p 119: ‘For those who conduct their intellectual lives primarily or exclusively through transcendental rationalism, that set of densely interconnected, mutually reinforcing ideas (claims, concepts, definitions, and so forth) operates as a virtually unbreachable cognitive and rhetorical system, or, one might say, as a continuously self-spinning, self-repairing, self-enclosing web… Everything in the system fits together tightly and securely. Whatever does not fit into the system is identified by the system as irrelevant or unauthentic… The rigorous, unremitting work of Reason creates a tight, taut web, intertextual and interconceptual’ (emphasis original).

68. Eg Nagel, T ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat’ in Nagel, T (ed) Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p 169 Google Scholar, where the author distinguishes between ‘what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves’ and ‘what it is like for a bat to be a bat’ (emphasis original).

69. Tully, J Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p 197 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70. Pollock, F ‘English Opportunities in Historical and Comparative Jurisprudence’, in Oxford Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1890) pp 47–48 Google Scholar (originally written in 1883). For an interesting and topical application of Pollock's ideas, see Goldstein, S ‘On Comparing and Unifying Civil Procedural Systems’ in Cotterrell, R (ed) Process and Substance (London: Butterworths, 1995) pp 1–43 Google Scholar.