The "Weak" Law: Contaminations And Legal.

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P.G. Monateri, Italian National Report to the Bristol Confrence, Topic I.C.2 "Import/Export"

The "Weak" Law:

Contaminations And Legal Cultures

Italian National Report to the Bristol Conference

By P.G.Monateri*

Introduction: "Imperfect Alternatives" and the "Weak Thought"        

PartI: Comparativism, Representation and Import        

Culture and Difference.        

Spread and Dissemination        

Formants and Elites        

The "Strategic" Model        

Part II: A Portrait of Italy as a "Weak" Tradition.        

The "Love affair" with the French        

The "Coming of the Germans"        

Conclusion: Convergence, Divergence and "Contamination"        

Bibliography        


Introduction: "Imperfect Alternatives" and the "Weak Thought"

The subject matter of "Legal transplants" has been invented by Alan Watson for scholarly purposes in comparative legal studies. But in the last decade the subject has been took over by purposive practical lawyers mainly involved in projects of "exporting" their own legal systems, especially from the West, to the former Socialist countries, or to the vast exotic world of Non-westerners. These projects are normally explicit projects of governance based as they are on a quite clear cut political agenda, sometimes expressed in the old-fashioned jargon of the fifties centred on the rhetoric of the "multy-party democracy", the "rule of law", and the "free market economy".

Lawyers involved in these projects of societal governance normally share one of two opposite attitudes. The first type of approach tends to blur the relevance of  the "legal culture". As an example we can take Komesar's theory of "Imperfect Alternatives". He presents and applies a theory of how to compare institutions, as a necessity for the evaluation of their performance, including institutions that make and apply the law. He terms his theory as the "participation-centered-approach", where institution's competence depends on the participation of institutional actors within it, analyzed in terms of their benefits and costs. This is a "non" culture bound approach, which in its strongest version tends to be indifferent to legal histories. From the opposite point of view strong emphasis is put on "legal cultures" and their role in framing national laws, and eventually in preventing, or "distorting", borrowings, transplants, and unification, but  in such discourses "culture" remains normally a drop in fuzzy conception to be used to make vague reference to a fluffy dimension of the law.

What I want to remark in my paper is that rules are not self-expressive; institutions need to communicate, and so the law is, in a way, to be wrapped about in a narrative. Thus  I want to focus on the practice of legal discourse, meaning the way of framing the world in legal terms. Henceforth rules and institutions are not my first concern here, and my attention is rather devoted to the way we speak about law, as a peculiar factor in the process of definition of one legal culture, and the way legal discourses are generated and mantained, eventually through borrowings and transplants. Thus I see my contribution as an effort in comparative jurisprudence, within the Civil law, using Italian law as an example from the standpoint of the emergence of a modern legal culture in a "weak" tradition. My perspective is thus consciuously out of the way: it is not centred on the today political agenda connected to the efforts to introduce or strenghten multi-party democracy, the rule of law, or a free-market economy. I rather adopt the deligimating move to reverse  foreground and background, making a shift toward non deliberate efforts of import/export of patterns, concentrating on discourses and not on institutions, and focusing on history more than on present issues.

I focus on thess aspects because of the problems raised by the process of  "commodification" of the legal rules, as it is suggested by the same label of "import and export of legal models", especially in relation to former Socialist countries. The job of lawyers being to produce interpretations of texts and authorities, what an imported "rule" or "institution" means, according to me, depends heavily on the strategies of the lawyers belonging to the borrowing system. If we define "ideology" as the processes by which meaning is produced, challenged, reproduced and transformed,  in this context it is fully justified to adopt "idelogical criticism" as a proper approach to legal diffusionism, from the point of view of analyzing within the legal process the struggle present in the production of meaning of borrowed norms.

From this perspective we can identify at least two strong, highly characterized "models" within the Civil law: the French, and the German, with Italy coming across, and passing through both.

Thus my work is thought from the "borrowing side", and just from the peculiar perspective of the formation of a legal "culture", which, I think, is anyway a major concern today for the emergence of a newer common European law.

In so doing I try, in the first part of the work, to concentrate on the general aspects of the process of importing and exporting legal patterns, and to sketch out a model of appraisal of legal "diffusionism" based on my reading of Watson's theory of tranplsants. The purpose of the model is to show the great role played by legal "elites" and "intellectuals", and their strategies,  in promoting borrowings from abroad. Then, in the second part, I use the Italian case as an example of major shifts in the legal discourse. Finally I try to develop some suggestions for the appraisal of import/export of legal patterns.


PartI: Comparativism, Representation and Import

Culture and Difference.

I start my argument in considering comparative law as an attempt to mediate between a "field" and an "audience", coping with the problem of self-definition of one culture within the legal world. It is indeed patent to me that we can speak of import/export only when we have defined where the boundary is, which means that we have stated principles of inclusion and of exclusion, of similarities and differences. Culture and difference has always been a central concern of comparative law, and the firts step of the conventional approach is to devide the legal world  into legal families through the tracing back of common roots, as genealogies to explain the present. Genealogies serve to define who we think we are, or would like to think we are. They define an "us" and a "them", and they are an essential mechanism of  how identities are constructed. The "tracing back of the roots" is a work of representation, which occupies a central place in current studies on culture, especially in the practice of  exhibiting cultures as "others". In these efforts of mapping cultures, systems of law are rejoined or distinguished according to a theory of what their basic units, or basic structures are, and according to the respective weights to assign to different elements. Thus defining identities depends heavily on the framework assumed for the mapping. A second point of major concern for comparative law has always been the transplants and borrowings of legal models across the various systems and families. This process of transplantation is sometimes presented to be evolutive, I mean without any direct project of governance, and sometimes as the result of a conscious and purposive design of reforms. We can thus single out two major aspects of comparativism in both the "culture and difference" department and the "import and export" sector.

In recent literature we see a renewal of interest in comparative law, aiming at a reconstruction in newer terms of its aims and methods. Of course a main subject today consists of the conciuous projects of export of "Western" legal models in the area of former socialist countries, with striving efforts in design of institutions, and in actual drafting of model laws, peculiarly in the field of Corporations. What is amazing is that such projects of governance trhrough exports of legal patterns are carried on notwithstanding the lack of a commonly accepted theory of legal "identities" and legal transplants. Thus my first aim is to try to sketch a model to cope with these problems.

From this standpoint I think that both the "definition of identities" as well as the "import/export" can be seen as interested, non neutral, purposive projects of governance.

Indeed we can notice that the rise of comparativism in early 19th century Germany has been linked with a project of defining identity and difference, in order to achieve a major borrowing and trasformation of patterns. In this process Roman legal scholarship, in the way it evolved during the Middle Ages and Enlightment has been inserted, as a whole, within the building of a national German law and transformed into a new system which at the end of the process became embodied into the new German code of 1900, the BGB. The definition of identity and difference has so been functional to a major transplant, directed toward the political goal of having a common German law for the new Empire.

Now if we adopt this strategy of analysis to cope with "comparative law" as a discipline, we can see how much it has been an attempt to meet different audiences, and their expectations. Which is to say that comparative law has not normally been "transnational" at all, but rather it has grown within the frameworks of different legal traditions, responding to "inner" needs of legal elites. From this point of view a first unexpected project that can be pursued by comparativism is "insulation".This strategy has been peculiarly pursued in Britain, where the distinction between a Common law and a Civil law has been used to "create" and defend a national identity in the field of the law. But the same "insulation" project has been used by socialist lawyers to mantain a felt separation of socialist countries from the rest of the world. A project purported also by "Western" specialist with a strong professional interest in defining the peculiar subject of soviet studies as one discipline within the Western academic world.

A peculiar strategy of marking difference with "aliens", while borrowing ideas from them, has been adopted by French scholars, and by Saleilles in particular. In his French presentation of the BGB he badged the Germans as different and "philosophical", a kind of an insult among lawyers, while importing conceptions from them. We can define this strategy as a form of "etherization" of the other, and its possible impact: it is a way of assimilating coupled with a denial of the borrowing.

At the opposite of insulation lies the strategy of comparative law for unification. It is quite apparent today the great extent in which the comparative law based on the search of a "common core" is used to deny differences among various european tradition to define a new identity, with practical implications. The definition of a common European legal identity is patently directed toward a massive cross-board import/export of patterns to create a new law. Thus once again the two departments of Comparative law work together by one possible use of comparativism. In this process the boundary among systems is more drawn between "Western" countries and Non-Western laws, in the form of the exoticization of African or Asian laws, and in mantaining an area of common Post-socialist systems as a major area of export of Western patterns. In both cases the "foreign" Non-western systems are made ready to receive Western models as necessary for their development in a clear conventional evolutive paradigm, inspired to such values as "democracy", the "rule of law", and the "free market". It is quite interesting from a comparative point of view that this great effort of the import department is intensively blurring the distinctions so often cultivated in the past among American and European systems. The difference between the French or the German model are quite completely forgotten, and even the sharper distinction between a Common and a Civil law world are softened , adding emphasis on common economic and political structures, and setting aside, toward the background, the legal technicalities by which such common structures operate in the different institutional settings of the "Western" legal world.

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I thus end this section mantaining the "purposive" non-neutral character of Comparative law, especially in its more neutral pretentions, I mean the projects of "mapping" the world in legal systems and families. Such "mappings", which are by definition crucial to a theory of transplants, are but efforts in defining identities, and in coping with "others".


Spread and Dissemination

In this second section I try to outline a model to account for borrowings and transplants, given the considerations unrolled in the previous section of the work. As I said before I use Watson's theory of legal transplants as a basis.

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