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Cet article vise à démontrer que la réponse civiliste au changement des circonstances contractuelles met en exergue, à côté des impératifs de sécurité et stabilité juridique, les valeurs de la justice et solidarité contractuelle, et est la solution qui s’est imposée dans la pratique du commerce international et dans les projets européens d’harmonisation contractuelle, en dépit de l’idée courante selon laquelle les droits du common law seraient plus business-friendly que les droits civilistes.

Jusqu'à aujourd'hui, les processus d'harmonisation du droit droit privé ont poursuivi l’idée d’un compromis, tant dans l’approche théorique que dans les règles proposées, entre la tradition du droit continental et celle du common law anglo-américain. Le propos de cet article est que tout projet d'harmonisation désireux d’aboutir devrait commencer dans un premier temps par déplacer le compromis (comme cela est nécessaire pour tout accord supranational) du côté de common law pour rechercher un équilibre à l’intérieur de la tradition continentale en prenant comme point de départ les concepts, notions et règles civilistes.

According to the common understanding, tort law is the branch of private law whose set of positive rules, institutions, and procedures aims to shift the costs of accidents from the victim to a different subject. Similar accounts of tort law are widespread and uncontested, yet they fail to do justice to the overall role tort law plays in societies. Tort law does not live in legislatures, law firms, courts, and law books only. It also lives “in the shadow” of the official system of adjudication: in the offices of insurance companies; in people's notions about injury and risk, responsibility and justice; in the languages and images associated with law in mass-generated popular culture; as well as in public debates about what values should be protected and promoted, at what costs, and at the expense of whom. On the assumption that tort law is at the same time a product and a constituent of the very cultural framework in which it is embedded, the aim of this paper is to explore its cultural dimensions in a broad comparative perspective. Combining insights from legal anthropology, socio-legal literature, legal history, and comparative law, the article tries to understand the role that, in Western and non-Western legal traditions, tort law plays in responding to, and managing social conflicts. In this perspective, the paper studies the cultural frameworks that sustain the adjudication process outside and inside the courtrooms, and analyzes how notions, practices, and remedies of tort law “in action” vary across different social and cultural settings. It then puts forward some conclusions about the extent to which tort law notions, ideas, concepts, categorizations, and perceptions influence and, reciprocally, are influenced by the cultural framework of which they are an expression.

The paper claims that ‘mixity’ is an inherent quality of almost any legal systems, and not only of those that, for historical reasons, inherited legal features from the civil and common law traditions. From this ‘pluralistic’ point of view, all the experiences where Western legal models interact among themselves, or with religious, indigenous or customary laws, deserve to be included into the ‘mixed’ category. Such an approach reveals itself as a powerful cognitive tool to advance comparative knowledge about legal systems. In particular, it enables one to better understand: (a) the dynamism of any given legal system – be it national, sub-, or supra-national –; (b) the driving forces behind the penetration of ‘foreign’ elements in a given legal experience; and (c) the reasons for which there are variable degrees of resistance and/or resilience amidst the different layers a legal system is made of.

In scholarly arenas, the European codification processes is in full swing. In this article, I try to understand the reasons for which many of the efforts thus far carried on in the European codification-driven academic circles have been pursuing a compromise, in both theoretical approach and proposed rules, with the English common law tradition and experience. The analysis of these reasons makes me suggest that, lacking in the near future a truly common pan-European legal culture, any project of codification aiming to be successful in practice should shift the direction of the compromise (as necessary as it is for any supranational agreement) from the common law side of the Channel towards the pursuit of a balance within the continent, taking as a starting point civilian concepts, notions, and rules., Dans les cercles académiques, les processus de codification du droit privé européen battent leur plein. Mon propos ici est d’essayer de comprendre les raisons par lesquelles ce processus poursuit l’idée d’un compromis, tant dans l’approche théorique que dans les règles proposées, avec la tradition et l’expérience anglaise du common law. L’analyse de ces raisons me fait conclure que – en l’absence, dans un futur proche, d’une véritable culture juridique commune à l’Europe toute entière – tout projet de codification désireux d’aboutir devrait commencer dans un premier temps par déplacer le compromis (comme cela est nécessaire pour tout accord supranational) du côté Outre-Manche pour rechercher un équilibre à l’intérieur du continent en prenant comme point de départ les concepts, notions et règles civilistes., Bussani Mauro. Faut-il se passer du common law (européen)? Réflexions sur un code civil continental dans le droit mondialisé. In: Revue internationale de droit comparé. Vol. 62 N°1,2010. pp. 7-25.