Law, Justice and Republic: The French Heritage

Judicial institutions have a growing role in our societies. In France, some scholars have even introduced the idea of a "government of the judges". However, while judicial institutions do not substitute for government and public administration they are becoming an important means of social regulation, perhaps the main one. This tendency is not the result of desires within the judiciary to increase the power of magistrates; rather it arises from the social functions attributed to the judicial system by the French model of republican law and justice. As the development of European judicial cooperation, the establishment of a "European judicial area" and the building of a new European judicial system demand cooperation and highlight areas of competition between different national models, an evaluation of this model is necessary. This chapter focuses on the structural logic of the French model. Starting from the standard analysis of judicial regulation (section 1), it considers the basis of the model - the republican dualism- (section 2) to explain the present role of judicial regulation (section 3).