Legal Reasoning and Legal Integration

TL;DRAbstract

According to Legrand, harmonization of European private law by means of a European Civil Code would not work, because of the different legal cultures (mentalités) within which such a code would have to operate. In the civil law tradition, legal reasoning on the basis of such a code would be deductive in the sense of the application of rules that are posited prior to the cases to which they should be applied. In the common law tradition, the starting point of legal reasoning is in the cases themselves. As a consequence, common law reasoning would abstract less from the peculiarities of individual cases. The main point of this paper is that Legrand's picture of civil law reasoning is based on the subsumption model of rule application, which does not allow adaptation of the law to the needs of concrete cases other than through the limited possibilities of interpretation. It is argued that this picture is wrong. As an alternative, the reason-based model of rule application is proposed, whi

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