'The Third Legal Family'
The establishment of an intellectual connection between civil law and common law is widely regarded as the most important prerequisite for the emergence of a genuinely European legal scholarship.1*”' Thus, it should be of the greatest interest for legal scholars in Europe to see that such connection has already been established, on an intellectual as well as practical level, in a number of 'mixed' legal systems.
They provide a wealth of experience of how these two branches of the European legal tradition may be accommodated within one legal system. Comparative lawyers have indeed started to pay attention to mixed legal systems as potential models for 'procuring] a gradual approximation of Civil Law and Common Law'.101 First attempts are even made to compare mixed legal systems with each other,11,2 to explore their similarities and differences, and to present them as 'a third legal family'.1(13 Some members of that family have codified their private law.1(14 Others are still largely based today on common (in the sense of uncodified) law. They present the particularly fascinating picture of courts and legal writers still having toH"' This has repeatedly been emphasized by Ernst Rabel; cf. the essays 'On Comparative Research in Legal History and Modern Law', 'Private Laws of Western Civilization', and 'Deutsches und amerikanisches Recht', all in Ernst Rabel, Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Ilans G. Leser, vol. iii (1967), 258, 276, 342; cf. also, for instance, Helmut Coing, 'Die Bedeutung der europäischen Rechtsgeschichte für die Rechtsvergleichung' (1967), in idem, Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Rechtsgeschichte, Rechtsphilosophie und Zivilrecht, vol. ii (1982), 176; Mathias Reimann, Towards a European Civil Code: Why Continental Jurists Should Consult their Transatlantic Colleagues', (1999) 73 Tulane Law Review 1341; Eless- ncr, (1999) 7 ZEmP 518 i.
101 Zweigert and Kolz (n. 90) 204. This approach is now forcefully advocated bySmits (n. 5) 117 ff.
102 See, e.g., Esin Orücü, Elspeth Attwooll, and Sean Coyle (eds.). Studies in Legal Systems: Mixed and Mixing (1996); on Scots and South African law, see the literature quoted infra n. 310, in particular the essays by Visser and Du Plessis.
*"·’ Vernon V. Palmer (ed.), Mixed Jurisdictions of the World: The Third Legal Family, forthcoming.
101 On the history of codification in Louisiana, and on Louisiana's mixed legal system in general, see Joachim Zekoll, 'Zwischen den Welten: Das Privatrecht von Louisiana als europäisch-amerikanische Mischrechtsordnung', in Reinhard Zimmermann (ed.). Amerikanische Rechtskidtur und europäisches Privatrechl: Impressionen aus der Netten Welt (1995), 11 ff.; Vernon V. Palmer, Louisiana: Microcosm of a Mixed Jurisdiction (1999); for Quebec see, e.g., EL Patrick Glenn, 'Quebec: Mixito and Monism’, in Orücü, Attwooll, and Coyle (n. 102) 1 ff.; cf. also Reimann, (1999) 73 Tulane Lau1 Review 1341 ff.
grapple with the historical sources of the ius commune and of the English common law and thus being faced with the specific problems and challenges arising from a living interaction between civil law and common law.
2.
More on the topic 'The Third Legal Family':
- On the Roman family, see Hodge, P. (1974), Roman Family Life, London: Longman; Dixon, S. (1992),
- Family Relationship
- CHAPTER IV FAMILY AND SUCCESSION
- Constantine’s legislation on family and marriage
- Family law
- The Roman Family
- The Roman family constituted the basic structural framework of Roman society.
- Early Roman Society The Roman family
- II. Discussion of Legal Position of Daughter in Ancient Eastern Legal Systems Egypt
- Legal rules and extra-legal restrictions
- 11. LEGAL UNITA' IN GERMANY: PANDECT1ST LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP AND THE CIVIL CODE
- Part II Interactions between Legal Theory and Legal Practic
- ‘Family’, ‘homecoming’, ‘growing together’—in trying to reconstruct how European identity was discursively imagined in Germany’s EU enlargement discourse during the 1990s, Hulsse (2006) argues that metaphors like these primordialise Europe and establish a binary opposition between insiders and outsiders.
- IV. HISTORICAL LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP AND LEGAL HISTORY
- In the Roman legal system, all private and public legal disputes were initiÂated by individuals against other individuals, all of whom became litigants once the matter was brought before the magistrate.
- A concept of legal validity that leaves out the elements of social efficacy and correctness of content was classified above as a concept of legal validity in a narrower sense.
- Although new work on women's contributions is on the horizon, international lawyers have written relatively little history of their discipline from a gender perspective, whether on legal subjects or actors in international law, or on gender relations as a way of signifying or structuring legal power.
- Legal scholars use the term ‘civil law systems’ to describe the legal systems of all those nations predominantly within the historical tradition derived from Roman law as transmitted to Continental Europe through the Corpus Iuris Civilis of Emperor Justinian.[834]
- The history of legal procedures is hardly less than the history of the legal system itself.