From Norms to Facts: The Realization of Rights in Common and Civil Private Law

Abstract

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...

Laments, Remedies, Rights: Nietzsche’sGenealogy of Moralitythrough the Prism of Roman Law

“…As Marietta Auer points out, the Roman system of actions in the first place “served the procedural enforcement of individual interests, without generalizing the substantive entitlements behind the individual types of actions into a concept of ‘right’” (Auer 2014, 22; my translation). The rare instance where Roman jurisprudence ostensibly goes beyond the actional character of classical Roman law by assuming “some concept of substance taking precedence over actional realization” (Dedek 2010) is the Celsus fragment from Justinian’s Digest. But in fact the fragment demonstrates the contrary: that the idea of a right as a substantive claim independent of procedure had not yet emerged.…”

“…But in fact the fragment demonstrates the contrary: that the idea of a right as a substantive claim independent of procedure had not yet emerged. In this fragment, Celsus refers to the actio as “the right to recover what is owed to us by means of a judicial proceeding.” And although there seems to be involved at least some notion of “prior entitlement” that can be enforced by means of action, what is striking here is that this entitlement is conceptualized “not as right, but in the passive voice as what is owed ” (Dedek 2010, 95).…”