Diversité ou unité? Culture juridique, correspondances et différences dans la recherche de la justice en Europe

Abstract

The Judiciary is a fundamental element of a legal culture and as such, it is influenced by its institutional and normative environment. Conversely, it contributes to form that environment. In the course of that interplay, it appears that the characteristic constitutive parameters of a legal culture are not constant. They are influence by statutory, political and economic forces, as well as by discursive jurisprudential reasoning. On the one hand, these factors have a centrifugal effect; on the other, they create new correspondences, which in turn are characteristic of a new form of European legal culture. From the vantage-point of the particular situation which prevailed in the Holy Roman Empire, it is possible to address the question, to what extent it provides any reference for acknowledging a European legal culture. Specifically, it may be argued that a transregional, and in some cases a European legal culture existed and may even have been developed in judicial practice, in particular in the area of commercial law. That development can be traced through opinions in commercial disputes, the socalled parères, and their reception, which would later be translated into statutory authorities.