The European Brotherhood of Lawyers: The Reinvention of Legal Science in the Making of European Private Law

Abstract

Against the historical backdrop of the codification debate in nineteenth century Germany, this article traces the reassertion of “legal science” as an autonomous source of European legal integration in current legal and political discourse about the harmonization of European private law. The article argues that a grasp of widely shared ideas about the role and function of legal science and legal scientists is vital both toward an understanding of the extraordinary impact of the academic project of a European civil code on legal and political discourse in the Union in particular, and toward furthering the theory of legal fields in general.

The harmonisation of private law in Europe and children's tort liability: A case of fundamental and children's rights mainstreaming

“…The future of harmonisation of European private law seems, at least for the time being, to be better off relying on the slow building of a European legal scholarship, based, for example, on courses of European private law and on the comparative work produced by national legislatures and courts, rather than on grand European legislative projects (Smits, 2004: paras. 47 ff;Bauer andMikulaschek, 2005: 1110-15;Wagner, 2006;Schepel, 2007). Accordingly, the harmonisation of private legal norms with an impact on children's rights and interests needs, for now, to settle for comparative child law courses, international conferences on children's rights, scholarly research on the impact of EU policy on children, and raising the awareness of national legislatures of the law applicable to children in other EU member states.…”

“It Now Exists”: The Birth of the Chilean Professional Legal Academia in the Wake of Neoliberalism

“…Publishing high-impact papers in international journals is entirely alien to the kind of scientific work inherited from the traditional forms of academic communication used by part-time professors or by the Spanish or German (or lately also Chilean) communities in which many scholars pursued their graduate degrees. Chilean legal scholars share the ideological project of construing law as an autonomous form of science taken from the Continental tradition (Schepel 2007)-a status that appears fragile when measured and evaluated by common currencies of academic practice.…”

References

“…The social legitimacy of European law derives from the variety of role lawyers played in the interdependent although relatively autonomous social processes that made Europe, putting legal knowledge and know-how at the core of International/European relations as a critical resources in State contests and corporate battles, and producing the dominant representations and expertises in which most of today's European politics and economics are embedded: a market regulated by law, an integrated juridical space (Megie 2006), a European Civil Code (Schepel 2007), a European Charter of Fundamental Rights (Madsen 2007), a European Constitution (Cohen & Vauchez 2007b). This paper will briefly summarize the broad social processes and political context in which the early institutionalization and decisions of the ECJ were embedded, and then go on analyzing the social and in particular professional profiles and trajectories of the members of the ECJ, mainly focusing on the early days of the Court.…”