Samuel, Geoffrey --- "All that Heaven Allows: Are Transnational Codes a ‘Scientific Truth’ or Are They Just a Form of Elegant ‘Pastiche’?" [2012] ELECD 584; in Monateri, Giuseppe Pier (ed), "Methods of Comparative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Methods of Comparative Law

Editor(s): Monateri, Giuseppe Pier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802529

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: All that Heaven Allows: Are Transnational Codes a ‘Scientific Truth’ or Are They Just a Form of Elegant ‘Pastiche’?

Author(s): Samuel, Geoffrey

Number of pages: 27

Extract:

8. All that heaven allows: are transnational codes a
`scientific truth' or are they just a form of elegant
`pastiche'?
Geoffrey Samuel*



A group of jurists from different European national legal systems, all contract specialists,
come together and over the following months produce a code designed to act as the basis
for a common and harmonised law of contract for the various nationalities involved. The
same process is repeated in a range of other legal areas. Is the existence of these codes, as
physical texts, evidence in itself of a particular `truth', namely that legal systems of Europe
are converging? Or is it evidence only of what a humanities specialist might call `pastiche
as combination'? Indeed might it be a question of nostalgic pastiche? These are the
questions that will be investigated in this chapter.


1. INTRODUCTION
In a recent essay on the state of comparative law in France the author, a French
comparative lawyer, asserts that `it is impossible to be both a comparatist and a good
French lawyer' and `it seems not only unrealistic but also counterproductive to insist that
French comparatists become interdisciplinary specialists or social scientists'.1 A few lines
earlier, the same author had asserted that the `Europeanization of law is already taking
place and European legal systems are already converging'.2 Another comparatist has
added that the question whether or not European legal systems are capable of being
harmonised depends more on the ideological orientation of the researcher than upon some
`independent truth'.3
...