The historical and epistemological obstacles 167 don. Knowledge of lawis not just a matter of knowledge of rules, of words organised and systematised. It is also a matter of things. These things are, perhaps to a large extent, created by the law since facts themselves are never evident; they exist only in relation to a pre-existing systemof thought.Yet to say that the facts are inherent in the abstract propositions of a code would also be a mistake, for the very abstraction of the codes means that the true source of a legal decision in any particular case is to be found in the process of analysis and application. The lawis to be found in what Christian Atias has called the incessant coming and going between law and fact in relation to the categories and to appropriate legal regime to be applied.One might add, also, it is found in relation to the institutional elements of persona, res and actiones which, in turn, comprise the quasi-normative concepts which play the key role in the movement from the social to the legal worlds. Concluding remarks It would be idle to suggest that the harmonisation of private lawin Europe will ultimately prove an impossible task, if only because one legal tradition will probably, in the end, come to dominate the other. Nevertheless the whole process of harmonisation raises a central question about what it is to have legal knowledge- what, in other words, is being harmonised?- and this question, in turn, leads to questions about how such knowledge is represented and howit is used to achieve practical results. These questions, it must be said, are now becoming the focus of attention by a number of writers^* and, indeed, comparative lawyers have long struggled with the apparently fundamental differences of ‘spirit’ or ‘style’ between the civil law and common lawtraditions.All the same, the great majority of jurists have never disputed the epistemological thesis that the object of legal science is a body of propositional knowledge (rules, principles or norms) and this rule-model has so dominated legal thought that not only are there few alternative models but many comparative lawyers have assumed that harmonisation of lawmust be possible since legal science dictates that all legal systems share the same object of science. Legal harmonisation is simple a matter of the convergence of propositional knowledge.^® J.-P- Astolfi & M. Devclay, La didactique des sciences (Presses Universitaires dc France, 3e. cd., 1994), p. 25. C. Atias, Epistemologie juridique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), p. 129. See e.g., C. Atias, Epistemologie du droit, op.cit; P. Legrand, European Legal Systems, op. cit. See e.g., F. Pringsheim, The Inner Relationship Between English and Roman Law [1935] Cambridge LawJournal 347; K. Zweigert & H. Kotz, Introduction to Comparative Law(Oxford UP, 2nd. rev. ed., 1992; trans. TWeir), pp. 63-75. See e.g., W. Mincke, Practical and propositional knowledge as the basis of European legal education, in B. de Witte & C Forder (eds.). The common lawofEurope and thefuture of legal education, op.cit., 285.
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