ABSTRACT
One of the most articulate and sustained criticisms of the whole corpus iuris Europaeum movement comes from Pierre Legrand. According to this author, ‘there exist in Europe irreducibly distinctive modes of legal perception and thinking, that the ambition of a European concordantia is (and must be) a chimera, that European legal systems are not converging’.52 Legrand is adamant that the common law mentalité is irreducibly different from the civil law’s for a number of reasons. The common law neither thinks in terms of rules nor cares for systematics – two features essential to the continental tradition – and, in addition, it has little understanding of the notion of a ‘right’ in the French sense of un droit subjectif.53 The English lawyer works primarily at the level of fact and uses on occasions reasoning arguments that no self-respecting civilian judge could ever find acceptable at the cognitive level.54 Rather than harmonising these differences, the present interrelationship between the civil and common law within the European Union serves only to exacerbate them.
