Every legal system that ties judicial decision making to a body of preconceived norms has to face the tension between the normative formulation of the ideal and its approximation in social reality. In the parlance of the common law, it is, more concretely, the remedy that bridges the gap between the ideal and the real, or, rather, between norms and facts. In the common law world—particularly in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—a lively discourse has developed around the question of how rights relate to remedies. To the civilian legal scholar—used to thinking within a framework that strictly categorizes terms like substance and procedure, subjective right, action, and execution—the concept of remedy remains a mystery. The lack of “remedy” in the vocabulary of the civil law is more than just a matter of attaching different labels to functional equivalents, it is the expression of a different way of thinking about law. Only if a legal system is capable of satisfactorily transposing the abstract discourse of the law into social reality does the legal machinery fulfill its purpose: due to the pivotal importance of this translational process, the way it is cast in legal concepts thus allows for an insight into the deep structure of a legal culture, and, convergence notwithstanding, the remaining epistemological differences between the legal traditions of the West. A mixed jurisdiction must reflect upon these differences in order to understand its own condition and to define its future course.Tout système juridique qui lie la prise de décision judiciaire à un ensemble de normes préconçues doit faire face à la tension qui existe entre la formulation normative d’un idéal et son approximation dans la réalité sociale. Dans la terminologie de la common law, c’est le remède, plus concrètement, qui palie l’écart entre l’idéal et le réel, ou plutôt, entre les normes et les faits. Dans les juridictions de common law, plus particulièrement au Royaume-Uni et au sein du Commonwealth, un vif débat est apparu sur les liens que les droits entretiennent avec les remèdes. Pour le juriste civiliste, habitué à raisonner dans un cadre qui catégorise strictement des termes tels que substance et procédure, droit subjectif, action et exécution, le concept de remède demeure un mystère. L’absence de « remèdes » dans le vocabulaire du droit civil n’est pas une simple question de nomenclature divergente pour décrire des équivalents fonctionnels. Il s’agit de l’expression d’une façon différente d’aborder le droit. L’appareil juridique n’atteindra ses objectifs que s’il est capable de transposer le discours abstrait du droit en réalité sociale. Étant donné l’importance primordiale de ce processus de transposition, son expression dans des concepts juridiques révèle la structure profonde d’une culture juridique et les différences épistémologiques qui subsistent entre les traditions juridiques occidentales, malgré leur convergence. Un...

No abstract

In the first edition of his famous treatise Reine Rechtslehre, Einleitung in die Rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik (translated as Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory), Hans Kelsen makes the claim that the existing liberal, property rights-based private law of his era is a ‘democratic form of law’ and that private law rights are ‘political in the same sense as those rights that are usually characterized as political rights.’ In this article, I aim to explain how Kelsen developed his theory of private law and private rights within the theoretical and methodological framework of the ‘Pure Theory of Law’ and its philosophical underpinnings of relativism and ‘value neutrality,’ culminating in the connection between private law and democracy. I wish to highlight, in particular, the still often underappreciated fact that the Pure Theory saw itself as a critical project, aimed at exposing and exorcizing ‘ideology.’ To Kelsen’s contemporary audiences, drawing a connection between ‘capitalist’ private law and democracy must have appeared particularly counter-intuitive against the backdrop of one of the most important – if now almost forgotten – political debates of the Weimar era, the debate on ‘economic democracy’ (‘Wirtschaftsdemokratie’). It was a powerful trope in the inter-war period that the capitalist economy and its institutional safeguards – private, labour, commercial, and corporate law – were ‘undemocratic.’ I submit that Kelsen’s statement – flipping the contemporaneous revisionist-socialist rhetoric on its head – may be better understood in the larger context of the precarity of democracy in the Weimar period and especially in the context of a theoretical and political challenge that contrasted the existing ‘bourgeois’ parliamentary democracy with a ‘true,’ ‘social’ democracy that would realize conditions of social and economic justice. By connecting ‘capitalistic’ law with ‘democracy’ and ‘socialistic’ law with ‘autocracy,’ Kelsen once more underscores that democracy, properly understood as a formal principle, is irreducible to substantive justice.

One of the major challenges legal education faces nowadays is that jurisdictional boundaries are losing significance in an internationalized, globalized and post-regulatory environment. This calls into question the very notion of "law" itself, at least as traditionally understood as a system of posited norms within a given jurisdiction, and the classic model of legal education based on such an understanding of law. While North American legal education has a longstanding tradition of self-reflection, the situation in Europe is different: there is little incentive for legal scholars to devote a considerable amount of time to a serious scholarly treatment of the issue of legal education. Whereas the challenge of internationalization, particularly in its emanation of "Europeanization", has literally become omnipresent in legal discourse, legal education is still dominated by a traditionalist view of its primary goal: an almost exclusive focus on training lawyers (or judges) for the practice within the boundaries of a national jurisdiction. As a contribution to the debate on the challenges posed to the teaching of law we would like to offer the following brief analysis of the efforts made at the Faculty of Law of McGill University, situated in Québec, Canada to develop a new approach to the teaching of law. Ten years ago, in 1998, the Faculty undertook the effort to offer an integrated comparative three year curriculum, known as the McGill Programme, that teaches even first year introductory courses, such as Contracts and Torts, from a comparative perspective. The ultimate aspiration of this programme, however, is to transcend the fixation on the study of law as the study of "legal systems"-hence the label "trans-systemic" legal education.

No abstract