Fromparis to the hague Lambert’s rejection of any inclination toward natural lawwas also evident. Or more precisely: to determine evolutionary lines and the desirable solutions of internal or national jurisprudence, the identification of a droit commun Icgislatif, which is to say a set of shared legal principles, inductively isolated by the interpreter by means of observation and the analysis of positive order belonging to one culture. Lambert recognized that the label was not a particularly felicitous one since judicial decisions, not legislation, would be the source of the information which would most interest the specialist in Comparative Law, on account of its being, as we know, the main producer of law. However, once again it was a matter of warding off the temptation of natural law- which his mentor Saleilles had evoked in the seat of Comparative Law and in the Paris congress itself - emphasizing the simply positive nature of the common juridical system which had to formulate the doctrine as législatif. As Lambert himself confessed shortly thereafter, “C’est une terminologie de combat ... que j’ai adoptee pour mon usage personnel ...”^o. Combat terminology. A most apt expression, which recalls the intellectual violence which permeated western thought at the end of the century,when European jurists, between a Kulturkampf and a Methodenstreit, struggled for law (Jhering) and for legal science (Kantorowicz). First of all, Lambert’s combat, at least as far as the present-day reader can deduce fromhis first scientific work, opposed exegesis, placing emphasis on the study of judicial precedents between sources and offering judges a scientific horizon of a droit commun Icgislatif outlined thanks to comparison. It also specifically combatted the recourse to natural law, only slightly less inevitable in this agitated moment of the history of legal interpretation; a natural law accepted by Saleilles and Geny,52 but always excluded from the comparative programme of the young Lambert. Finally, and beyond source discussion, combat was directed against the limited conception of Comparative Law which persisted in Saleilles’s defining classification, in other words, that droit commun de Vhumanité civilisée referred to briefly a few lines back. The Saleillesian beginning of Lambert’s proposals was unmistakable and throughout the rapport Lambert was, for the most part, very respectful concerning the teachings of his mentor: in the methodological discussion, Lambert, like Saleilles (and Meynal^^), uses an evocaEdouard Lambert, La fonction du droit civil compare, cit. p. 944. Cfr. now Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred. (The Bourgois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Hi), NewYork-London, W. W. Norton, 1993. Bruno Oppetit, “Frani^ois Gény et le droit naturel”, in Quaderni fiorentini, 20 (1991), 89147 117. 5-’ cfr. Edouard Mavnal, “Remarques sur le role joue par la doctrine et la jurisprudence dans I’ocuvre d’unification du droit en France, depuis la redaction des Coutumes jusqu’a la Revolution, cn particulier dans la succesion aux propres”, in Proces-verbaux des seances et documents cit. I, 269-309.
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