My class
23 października 2023, Portugalia ⋅ ☀️ 17 °CA couple of my friends want to know more about the class I’m here to teach. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since they are educators themselves! So here goes— The class is part of the Czytaj więcej
Podróżnik Sounds like a class I’d like to attend!
Laurie Reynolds Sounds like a class we could teach together😀
Podróżnik Thanks, Laurie. I'm not a lawyer, so I may get the terminology wrong as I try to articulate a couple of questions. I'm assuming Portuguese law is Code-based, like Spanish, French, Argentine, etc. law. That means law students need to know the Civil, Criminal (Penal), Commercial, etc. Codes in order to be allowed to practice law. In the U.S. and England, there are no such Codes governing the law, but instead jurisprudence. That is why you teach U.S. law case by case (please correct any of what I just wrote if it is not true). My two questions are: 1. Do you think Codes are mostly found in countries heavily influenced by Ancient Rome (where Romance languages are official) vs. Anglo-Saxon countries? 2. Do your Portuguese students (and others from "Latin" countries) find it difficult to process U.S. law, in the absence of Codes?
Laurie Reynolds We can have a good long chat when I’m back but here’s my non-comparativist take on this. Imho (but it’s an uneducated opinion) the differences between civil and common law systems in terms of legal analysis are not so tremendously different. The US probably has more statutes per person than Portugal. But there is a layer of uncodified common law principles that underlies, coexists with, supplements, modifies, or is abolished by statutory law (depending on the situation). So that makes for some fancy footwork analysis that’s not needed in a civil law country. In terms of statutory analysis, when I say “ balancing test” my civil law students say “ concordance” or “subsidiarity” or “ proportionality” but we all look at the same things. I do think common law judges feel less constrained and freer to do their own thing than civil law judges but I think that in the final analysis there is no such thing as neutral objective legal principles - they are all value-laden. And civil law judges have values just like common law judges.
Laurie Reynolds One big difference is in terms of precedential value of cases/ judicial legal opinions. At least as far as I understand it, civil law cases have little or no precedential value for future cases, while they are extremely constraining for common law judges.
Laurie Reynolds But I am just shooting from the hip so someone who knows their stuff may totally disagree