French legal method

Book abstract:

The author of this book has twenty years experience as a teacher of French law. The major part gained at King's College London, Law School where she observed the difficulties in adapting to French legal method encountered by English Law students involved in Anglo-French programmes. This book is therefore intended to advance knowledge of the techniques of legal analysis employed by French jurists to whom form, structure and method are very important. The work is organised in three parts; Part 1 - The Law-Making Process, Part II - The Method of Deciding Cases and Part III - Legal Education. The five chapters in Part I address in turn - the legislative process and the drafting of bills - codification and acceleration of that process in recent years - the rules concerning precedents - the process of law reform in France. Part II comprises four chapters featuring: Judges, their recruitment and training; Judicial reasoning, the style of argument and emphasis on the deductive method; Judicial style, the form, structure and language of French judicial decisions; Case notes, the form they take and the functions they perform together with illustration of the importance given to academic writing in the clarifying of court decisions. Two chapters are contained in Part III: chapter ten focuses on the setting and the structure within which law is taught and the dominant role that French law schools play in shaping French lawyers mode of thought. Chapter eleven explains the French system of well defined legal exercises designed to test the practical application of students learning - cas pratique, dissertation, and commentaire d'arret. The work will interest law students embarking upon Anglo-French Law programmes and practitioners and researchers in law reform. Eva Steiner has been a lecturer in French Law at King's College London for 14 years. She is a French Advocat and a member of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

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