Bijuralism in Law's Empire and in Law's Cosmos.

Abstract

A little more than two years ago, McGill University in Montreal like Louisiana State University, a law faculty located in a mixed, primarily civil law jurisdiction embarked on a bold experiment for teaching the common law and the civil law in an integrated or (in McGill parlance) transsystemic manner from the first day of the first year of law school.1 Until that time the common law and the civil law had largely been taught in separate streams, a bit like law and equity in the English legal tradition, running in the same river bed with their waters never mingling. Before the advent of the new bijural program, students arrived at McGill branded as either common lawyers or civilians and generally studied areas of substantive private law twice, without any real occasion to synthesize or to compare the two grand Western legal traditions. The explicit focus for teaching was the law in force in either common law or civil law Canada, understood first as freestanding systems of law, on the plausible premise that two bodies of law could not apply to problems involving the same people in the same place at the same time. As a result, the concern to contemplate sameness or difference in any sustained way was, at best, a second-order one. The descriptive tag by which the curriculum came to be knownthe National Program fit these territorially defined ambitions perfectly, reflecting one conception of the way in which Canadian federalism formally organizes the application of the common law and the civil law. On this view, they are understood as two largely autonomous orders of private law that are either completely relevant to law students, or completely irrelevant to them, depending on where those students find themselves and what the legal problem at hand might be. Bijuralism at McGill thus meant peaceful cohabitation rather than active dialog between the common law and the civil law (and their teachers), and this was generally thought to be just fine for the Quebecer who, given the demographics of Canadian legal life, might well fear being crowded out in

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