The French Reform of Contracts: An Opportunity to Tie Together the Community of Civil Lawyers

• Author: Michel Séjean
• Position: Professor of law at the Université Bretagne Sud (University of Southern Brittany), and Editor-in-Chief of the Henri Capitant Law Review, a bilingual law review in French and English.
• Pages: 1151-1161

The French Reform of Contracts: An Opportunity to

Tie Together the Community of Civil Lawyers

Michel Séjean*

INTRODUCTION1

In 2014, in front of the French Senate, Minister of Justice Christiane

Taubira made the following stark statement regarding the French law of

contract’s loss of influence:

As you all know, a battle of influence has been waged in Europe,

in particular between our continental law—the strength of our law

as it is written and designed—and what we call the common law—

which has its own influence, its approach of services and of certain

professions. This battle has been waged daily and will be waged

permanently. Our contract law no longer inspires anybody in the

world—those that drew inspiration from it have already moved on

to the next step!—let us not be surprised at our loss of influence.

Yet, for a long time and on a large scale, France used to influence

Europe and the world through law.2

These words trigger some discomfort. Instead of approaching the

relationships between civil law and common law with a metaphor on war

—whose outcome implies the winner’s superiority over the loser—it

would certainly have been more appropriate to promote civil law as a

perfectly valid alternative to any other legal tradition, including common

Copyright 2016, by MICHEL SÉJEAN.

* Professor of law at the Uni versité Bretagne Sud (University of Southern

Brittany), and Editor-in-Chief of the Henri Capitant Law Review, a bilingual law

review in French and English. The Author would like to thank the Volume 76

Board of Editors of the Louisiana Law Review for their insight, patience, and

constructive criticism.

1. At the time this Essay was written, the Ordinance of February 10, 2016

had not yet been published, and the relevant source was the Draft Reform of

February 25, 2015. Because of editorial constraints, the Author made no changes

to the original version of this Essay, even though the 2016 Ordinance modifies

many aspects of the 2015 Draft, including some parts that the Author criticized.

2. 2014 JOURNAL OFFICIEL DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE: SÉNAT 632 (daily ed.

Jan. 23, 2014) (statement of Sen. Taubira), available at http://www.senat.fr/séances

/s201401/s20140123/s20140123.pdf [https://perma.cc/8JYT-Z75Q] (Author’s

translation); Se e generally CONSEIL D’ÉTAT, L’INFLUENCE INTERNATIONALE DU DROIT

FRANÇAIS (2001), available at http://www.ladocumentatio nfrancaise.fr/var/sto rage/rap

ports-publics/014000702.pdf [https://perma.cc/UY9B-KY9K] (discussing this loss of

influence on a global scale).