CARTOGRAPHIE DE LA MIXITE : LA COMMON LAW ET LA COMPLETUDE DU DROIT CIVIL AU QUEBEC

Abstract

In the early 1990s, the legal community was wondering how the new Civil Code would affect the interaction of Quebec’s civil law system with the world around it. Fifteen years ago, when the Civil Code came into force, two diverging trends were foreseeable. First, codification’s systemic effect might have encouraged a process of “nationalization and local systematization”, or even “an accelerated shrinking of sources”. In that event, the new Civil Code would become both the alpha and the omega of private law reasoning. It would reinforce the idea of the closed nature of Quebec civil law and would prevent outside law from intruding (unduly). But the opposite trend was just as conceivable: the framing of a contemporary code, built from eclectic sources, would be expressed by a newly confident and mature legal system in Quebec, and would open the door to interpretive practices that were more curious and less static. At first view, the practice of looking to outside sources for the legal interpretation of the Civil Code suggests that there was neither a closure of the borders nor a comparatist explosion in Quebec – the opening H. Patrick Glenn had hoped for never came to pass.