ABSTRACT
The main feature of the French system of courts is the existence of two distinct and separate hierarchies of courts, namely: the judicial and the administrative. Among the treaties binding in France are the European treaties that establish international courts: the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. The character of the style of the opinions follows from the general conception of the French judge, who is supposed to exercise not 'judicial power', but only a 'judicial function'. In the French legal language, the word 'precedent' never means a binding decision, because courts are never bound by precedents. In the French context, factors weakening precedent are simply the negation or absence of the factors contributing to the normative force of precedent. In legal dogmatics, the argument which French scholars often mention in order to justify the bindingness of precedents is the necessary unification of judge-made law, reflected on an institutional level through the hierarchy of courts.
