Judicial Transformations: The Rights Revolution in the Courts of Europe by Mitchel de S‐O‐l' E. Lasser
| Published date | 01 May 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2011.856-2.x |
| Author | Carol Harlow |
| Date | 01 May 2011 |
Whilst the ¢ner details of the exact allocationof the edited works amongst the
members of the commission and perhaps, despite the author’s reservations (108),
the identitiesof the editors by whomthe ¢nal text of the Digestwas determined,
will doubtless conti nue to exercisethe minds of the more mathematically minded
historians of Roman law for some time to come, others, including this reviewer,
will be content toaccept that Honore
Ł’s work puts beyond doubtthat the editorial
work on the Digest was indeed begun and completed within the three years
claimed by Justinian and that the task was accomplished according to a rigorous
timetable established byTribonian.Those whose interestslie more in the natureof
the law than in the processes by which it is brought about may cavil at the time
spent achieving this understanding. But the interaction between form and con-
tent is particularly strident in the case of the texts of the Digest: much of the time
of the ¢nest talents of Roman law scholarship was expended during the early
twentiethcentury on a search for criteriawhich would assist in the determination
of the authentic original form of the texts edited in the Digest. By exposing the
processes by which this editing task was undertaken Honore
Łhas greatlyenlarged
the sense of what itis possible toassume was altered by the compilers. Argument
will continue to focus on the amount and form of these changes but it will now
take place against a surer understanding of the processes involved in making
them.
The Digest is a fundamental part of the legal and cultural heritage of modern
Europe. One, amongst a number, of Tony Honore
Ł’s lifetime achievements has
been to deepen immensely our understanding of its nature.
Andrew Le wis
n
Mitchel de S-O-l’ E. Lasser, Judicial Transformations:The Rights Revolution in
the Courts of Europe
,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009,341pp, hb d55.00.
Mitchel de Lasser is a man with a mission. He is a comparative law scholar of
reputation, unusually well readin French legal theory, who has in addition a deep
knowledge of theFrench system gainedin France. Over the years, Lasser has been
building his reputation as defender and interpreter of the French civilian system
of justice to American jurists. American comparativists, he believes, view the
French system th rough the distorting lens of theirown preferred model of ‘trans-
parent judicial reasoning’, hence seriously misinterpreting it. French civil law is
presented by Americans as a formalist system of legal reasoning, which demotes
the judicialfunction to the mechanical appl ication of statutorynorms (see eg John
Dawson’sTheOraclesoftheLaw(Michigan, 1968)). This results from the ‘cryptic
style of expression’ used by French judges, which ‘does not permit the adoption
of a reasoned and e¡ective case-law method’ (‘Judicial Self-Portraits: Judicial Dis-
course in the French Judicial System’ (1995) 104 Yale LJ 1325,1333). In turn, this
debars the civilian judgefrom the core judicial function of legal reasoning, which
n
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Reviews
482 r2011The Authors.The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2011) 74(3) 479^501
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