Le ius commune européen : « hareng rouge » de l’approche comparative des traditions juridiques anglaise et française

Abstract

In order to understand the late-medieval or early-modern English law in a comparative perspective, an approach based on ius commune only leads to a dead end. The French legal historian is handicapped from the start because his national historiography focuses too exclusively on specific French developments and fails to grasp the essential and changing features of the early-modern European civil law tradition. Even supposing that these constraints could be overcome, the English civil law does not pave the way to a proper understanding of the character of the English common law or early-modern Equity. In the small world of European ius commune, the early-modern method (i.e. the usus modernus, which merged ius commune and territorial iura propria in a systematisation by subject-matter) maintained an interface between continental legal systems, but the English usus modernus literature of early-modern English writers such as the civilians John Cowell and Thomas Wood or (exceptionally) a common lawyer such as Sir William Jones was too peripheral to have any major impact on English law.

Keywords

• ius commune
• English usus modernus
• French historiography
• Cowell John (1554-1611)
• Wood Thomas (1661-1722)
• Jones William (1746-1794)