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Legal doctrine in crisis: towards a European legal science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Mark Van Hoecke  and
François Ost
Mark Van Hoecke
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Brussel
François Ost
Affiliation:
Facultés universitaires St-Louis, Brussels
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Extract

Legal doctrine has two aims: describing and systematising the law. The description of currently valid law within a given legal system is the most visible and, from a quantitative point of view, the most important task for legal doctrine. From a qualitative point of view, however, systematisation of the law is by far its most important task. Systematisation is the construction of a conceptual framework of the law, which is a necessary basis for any legal rule and for any legal reasoning. Systematisation presupposes a description of the rules, principles, concepts, etc, which are to be systematised. But description of the rules is impossible without the conceptual framework that the systematisation of the law offers. Even the law itself is based on this conceptual framework. Codifications, such as the Code Napoléon or the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, were made possible because of the centuries-long preparatory work of legal doctrine.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 197 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 1998

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References

1. Ost, F and van de Kerchove, M ‘Rationalité et souveraineté du législateur, “paradigmes” de la dogmatique juridique’ inOst, F and van der Kerchove, M Jalons pour une théorie critique du droit (Brussels: Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1987) pp 97–134 Google Scholar.

2. See on ‘le phénomène Magnaud’, president of the Tribunal de première instance in Château-Thierry (France) between 1889 and 1904, who judged on the basis of his convictions of equity only, without really taking into account the written law: Gény, F Méthode d'interprétation et sources en droit privé positif (Paris: LGDJ, 2nd edn, 1954) pp 287–307 Google Scholar.

3. von Kirchmann, J H Die Wertlosigkeit der Jurispdenz als Wissenschafr (Berlin, 1848, reprint: Freiburg/Berlin, ed H Klenner, 1990) p 23 Google Scholar.

4. At the most a ‘quasi science’, or, in the words of Bourdieu ‘un discours demi-savant’ (P Bourdieu Homo academicus (Paris: Sevil, 1984) p 30).

5. See on this point Van Hoecke, M, What is Legal Theory? (Leuven: Acco, 1985) pp 28–29 Google Scholar.

6. Van Gerven, W ‘De verkokering van het privaatrecht’ Tijdschrifi voor Privaatrechr (1991) 1021–1023 Google Scholar.

7. Mark Eyskens, Professor of Economy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and former Prime Minister of the Belgian government, has formulated the law of ‘diminishing relative knowledge’: even when the current generation knows more than the previous one, all of us know less than they did in the previous generation, compared to the total amount of currently available knowledge.

8. The last treatise of this kind published in Belgium was the Traitéélémentaire de droit civil belge, in 16 volumes, published in the 1930 s and 1940s by Henri De Page, who was during most of that period both full time judge and full time professor at the university in Brussels! During a similar period in the last decades (1969–1996) the first treatise of a comparable size, in Dutch, was published in Belgium: ‘Beginselen van Belgisch Privaatrecht’ (R Dillemans and W Van Gerven (eds). It needed 11 authors to publish 12 volumes and still remains uncomplete in 1997, 30 years after the launching of the project.

9. A Esmein ‘La jurisprudence et la doctrine’ (1902) Revue trimestrielle de droit civil 11–12.

10. According to Perrot, this yearly report, introduced by the Cour de cassation Act in 1967, has already led to at least 150 legislative changes (A Perrot ‘La doctrine et l'hypothèse du déclin du droit’ in Poirmeur, Y La doctrine juridique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993) p 207)Google Scholar.

11. see A Perrot (above n 10) p 206.

12. J-Ch Galloux ‘Le Comité consultatif national d'éthique pour les sciences de la vie et de la santé est- il une autorité de doctrine?’ in Poirmeur (above n 10) p 241.

13. See on this also Y Dezalay ‘La production doctrinale comme objet et terrain de luttes politiques et professionnelles’ in Poirmeur (above n 10) pp 237 et seq.

14. Compare S Strömholm ‘Rechtsvergleichung und Rechtsangleichung. Theoretische Möglichkeiten und praktische Grenzen in der Gegenwart’ (1992) RabelsZeitschrift 619–620; U H Schneider ‘Europäische und internationale Harmonisierung des Bankvertragsrechts. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Angleichung des Privatrechts in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft’ (1991) Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 1987.

15. Collins, H Good Faith in European Contract Law’ (1994) 14 OJLS 229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. See eg Storme, M ‘Recht op recht’ (1994) Feestbundel 30 jaar Tijdschrift voor Privaatrecht, T.P.R. (extra volume) pp VII–XIV Google Scholar; Van Gerven, W ‘De redactie privaat. Pleidooi voor een terughoudende rechtsleer’ Tijdschrift voor Privaatrecht (1994) p 761 Google Scholar.

17. We thank professor John Bell for having drawn our attention on this aspect of the problem, when discussing an earlier draft of this paper during the annual conference of the SPTL held in Warwick, 17–20 September 1997.

18. Van de Kerchove, M and Ost, F Legal System Between Order and Disorder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

19. Prigogine, I La fin des certitudes (Paris: O Jacob, 1996)Google Scholar.

20. European Court of Human Rights, 13 June 1979 (Marckx decision).

21. Article 1 of the Act of 6 January 1989 (‘Bijzondere Wet op her Arbitragehof’).

22. See eg art 12 of the Italian Provisions of the Law in General, art 1.1 of the Preliminary Provisions of the Spanish Civil Code, art 215 of the EEC Treaty of 1957, art 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice.

23. See, for more details, VanHoecke, M ‘The Use of Unwritten Legal Principles by Courts’ (1995) Ratio Juris 248.Google Scholar

24. Here, we leave aside the obvious differences between ‘unwritten general principles of law’ on the one hand, and ‘human rights principles’, on the other. For this, we may refer to: Delmas-Marty, M Pour un droit commun (Paris: Sevil, 1994) pp 172–186 Google Scholar. But, as both Delmas-Marty (op cit pp 240–241) and Arnaud, A-J (Pour une pensée juridique européenne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991)Google Scholar have emphasised, European law (and thus European legal science) will have to live with pluralism and complexity.

25. See, for some examples, VanGerven, W ‘Principe de proportionalité, abus de droit et droits fondamentaux’ (1992) Journal des Tribunaux 305.Google Scholar

26. In the preamble to the Single European Act of 1987 reference was made for the first time to ‘the fundamental rights recognised in the constitutions and laws of the member states, in the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the European Social Charter, notably freedom, equality and social justice’. Article F of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 provides now explicitly that ‘the Union shall respect fundamental rights as governed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms…and as they result from the constitutional traditions common to the member states as general principles of Community Law’..

27. See, for an overview of ECJ case law, Persaud, I ‘The Reconstruction of Human Rights in the European Legal Order’ in Gearty, C A (ed) European Civil Liberties and the European Convention on Human Rights (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1997) pp 364–385 Google Scholar.

28. Article 1134 of the Code Napoléon, still art 1134 of the French and Belgian Civil Code; art 1337 of the Italian Civil Code; art 1258 of the Spanish Civil Code; para 242 of the German Civil Code. An article with the same or similar content may be found in many other European civil codes.

29. Such as Italy, Belgium, Finland or Germany (see M Van Hoecke (above n 23) at 251).

30. 93/13 EEC, 5 April 1993, OJ L 1993, 95/29.

31. H Collins ‘Good Faith in European Contract Law’ (1994) 14 OJLS 249.

32. On the problem of languages in the development of a common European legal science, see M Van Hoecke ‘Hohfeld and Comparative Law’ (1996) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 185 at 188–194.

33. This point is discussed at length in a forthcoming paper by M van Hoeck and M Warrington ‘Legal Cultures, Legal Paradigms and Legal Doctrine: Towards a New Model for Comparative Law’, to be published in ICLQ in 1998.