The concept of ‘common law’ in the tradition of Ancient French customary law: An update

Abstract

The historical significance of the concept of 'common law' (droit commun) has sparked a lot of debate in the French historiography. And it is not over. The issue of 'common law' raises the thorny issue of the relationship between local customs and Roman law in a State where 'the king is emperor in his kingdom'. It would nevertheless seem that the significance of the term 'common law' has evolved a lot in France, and the transformation of this notion occurred in accordance with the ideas of learned legal scholars. Ultimately, this notion has been used in French legal doctrine to denote the specificity of French legal culture in the modern period. This phenomenon was enabled by the process of 'de-Romanization' (Yan Thomas) to which the concept of 'common law' has been subjected among the Roman law scholars of the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries.