Resumo da Obra

O artigo faz uma análise empírica de decisões da Inglaterra, França e Alemanha do fim do século 19 (por volta de 1880) e decisões já no século 21, a partir das referências a precedentes, legislação e doutrina.
O objetivo é verificar se a afirmação de que os sistemas do common law e civil law são realmente diferentes e se eles estariam convergindo, como o senso comum costuma dizer.
Entre os resultados encontrados o que é interessante é que:

1. O Tribunal francês é o mais diferente entre os três, já que não faz referência alguma seja para precedentes, legislação e doutrina.
2. O Tribunal inglês e alemão são parecidos em termos quantitativos ao tratar de precedentes. O que difere é a forma como cada um usa os precedentes, já que na Inglaterra é feita uma análise dos fatos e fundamentos dos precedentes, o que não ocorre na Alemanha.
3. Um ponto interessante é que, nas decisões da Alemanha no século 21 há uma grande influência da doutrina nas decisões, já que é muito referenciada e não apenas para reforçar argumentos, mas também para justificar o porquê o Tribunal não está seguindo determinada doutrina.
   Assim, o artigo demonstra que a maior diferença não se verificou em razão do sistema do common/civil law (pois seria esperada alguma semelhança entre os tribunais alemão e francês), mas pela simples mudança de jurisdição que se traduz em formas diferentes dos juízes decidirem os casos.

Conexões

202507100838 - Spamann (2024) - Civil V. Common Law, The Emperor Has No Clothes
202506071202 - Komárek (2013) - Reasoning with Previous Decisions, Beyond the Doctrine of Precedent

Citações e Passagens Relevantes

I. INTRODUCTION

Os autores se propuseram a analisar empiricamente as alegações de que os sistemas de civil e common law são diferentes em como as decisões são fundamentadas e se, conforme apontam alguns autores, essa diferença estaria diminuindo para que os sistemas convirjam. Foram analisadas decisões da Inglaterra, França e Alemanha em matéria de contratos. Serão analisados os usos de direito estatutário (leis, regulamentos, instruções), precedentes e doutrinas.

Go to annotation “A common trope in comparative law is that common and civil lawyers reason differently but that they are converging.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 2)

Go to annotation “The empirical evidence for such claims is thin to non-existent.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 2) (…) Go to annotation “It is impossible to gauge the intensity of the differences, or even their existence, when the “evidence” is cherry-picked to support a particular conclusion.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 2)

Go to annotation “In this paper, we present the first systematic, quantitative comparison of common/civil law differences in judicial opinions in three paragon jurisdictions over a century apart: England vs. France and Germany, 1880-89 vs. 2007-16.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 2)

Go to annotation “Our results partially confirm, partially disprove, and partially modify the common wisdom.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 2) (…) Go to annotation “The French court nonetheless stands out when we focus on categorical differences: unlike the English and German courts, the French apex court barely presents any reasoning at all, and never cites precedent or literature. Second, as between England and Germany, the differences are smaller than previously believed; they are not categorical. For example, the German apex court not only used but distinguished and overruled precedent even in the 1880s. That said, the German apex court did and does engage with precedent less closely than its English counterpart, consistent with a weak version of common/civil law differences. Fourth and finally, there is no convergence.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, pp. 2-3)

II. THE COMMON/CIVIL LAW DISTINCTION

Os autores fazem uma breve explicação do que seria o common e civil law. Civil Law seria o sistema da europa continental decorrente do estudo do corpus iuris civilis e posterior codificação, enquanto o common law seria o sistema criado na Inglaterra, sem influencia romana, decorrente das cortes inglesas e que resultaram na doutrina do stare decisis. O ponto central da diferença seria que o common law decorre de precedentes e o civil law dos códigos, sendo que ambos os institutos datam do século 19 em ambos os casos. De qualquer modo, não existe precedente completamente vinculante nem codificação que seja completa, assim como os países de common law usam de precedentes e existem códigos em países de common law.

Go to annotation “On the Continent, legal development from the 11th century onwards was shaped by the study of the ancient Roman Corpus Juris Civilis – hence the name Civil Law. Together with the Church’s canon law, the Corpus served as the basis for a continent-wide legal discourse and legal development, and sometimes had subsidiary force of law: the ius commune. England proved more resistant to this influence. It had created a centralized court in the 12th century. This court (and later centralized courts, plural) created its own uniform terminology and procedure for the entire country: hence its name, the Common Law.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 4)

Go to annotation “Of particular interest for present purposes, there is a widespread perception that common law is based primarily on precedent (i.e., case law) whereas civil law is based primarily on statute. While there is no empirical research about the accuracy or origin of this perception, it may have to do with certain legal developments in the 19th century: stare decisis in the common law, and codification in the civil law. Common law courts hardened precedent into the doctrine of stare decisis: the rule that the legal rationale of prior judicial decisions must be followed in subsequent judicial decisions. That is, stare decisis makes precedent formally binding. Civil law jurisdictions did not adopt this as a general rule, and many civilians still resist calling precedent a “source of law.”” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 4)

Go to annotation “Whether any of this makes a practical difference is a separate question. No code is complete, and no precedent absolutely binding. At a minimum, we know that civil law jurisdictions are full of precedent and common law jurisdictions full of statutes. Many experts dispute that common/civil is about case/statute at all. Our paper tests one aspect of this dispute: the extent to which there is such a difference in the reasons highest courts give.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, pp. 4-5)

III. THE ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND GERMAN APEX COURTS

Go to annotation “The English, French, and German apex courts for contract cases are the House of Lords / Supreme Court, the Cour de Cassation, and the Reichsgericht / Bundesgerichtshof, respectively.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 5)

A. ENGLAND: HOUSE OF LORDS / SUPREME COURT

Aqui eles simplesmente falaram do histórico da casa dos lordes, antiga corte suprema e que foi transformada na supreme court em 2009. Também falaram de como essas cortes têm poucos julgamentos no ano, o que poderia dificultar a análise de casos de contratos, mas os autores consideraram suficiente para o estudo.

B. FRANCE: COUR DE CASSATION

Go to annotation “For France, our data come from the Cour de Cassation. It was created in 1790 and given its present name in 1804. As the name implies, it merely annuls erroneous decisions by lower courts; it does not render final judgments itself. Nonetheless, it is indisputably the apex court in civil and criminal matters. Decisions by the French Cours d’Appel—one rung below—have much less importance for practitioners and the development of the law compared to those of the Cour de Cassation.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 6)

C. GERMANY: REICHSGERICHT / BUNDESGERICHTSHOF

As decisões analisadas serão do Reichsgericht e do Bundesgerichtshof que sucedeu aquele, o primeiro para o fim do sec. 19, e o segundo para as decisões do sec. 21.

IV. SAMPLE CONSTRUCTION

Aqui os autores descrevem o método de análise dos casos que servirão para fundamentar as conclusões posteriores.

V. FEATURE CODING

Nesse tópico os autores explicam o método de análise dos casos analisados, para formar duas tabelas com estatísticas a respeito do uso de precedentes, legislação e doutrina.

Go to annotation “We manually coded each opinion for 31 features primarily capturing the courts’ use of authorities—not just the if, but the how. We defined these features to capture what we believe to be the principal possibilities how an adjudicator can deal with legal authorities.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 9)

VI. STATISTICAL METHODS

Discussão sobre métodos estatísticos aplicados ao estudo.

VII. FINDINGS

A. HIGH-LEVEL FINDINGS

Entre as principais descobertas é de que existem diferenças entre as três cortes, e que não diminuem ao longo do tempo. Não há um ponto fora da curva, como seria de se esperar entre a suprema corte inglesa e francesa/alemã, considerando a diferença de common law e civil law. Na verdade é a França a mais diferente. Por fim, os tribunais alemães e ingleses são diferentes em grau mas não na espécie, já que não há grandes diferenças no modo como o tribunal alemão julga, havendo casos de distinguishing mesmo no sec. 19.

Go to annotation “First, there are large and pervasive differences between all three courts.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 14)

Go to annotation “Second, these differences do not diminish over time: there is no convergence. In fact, differences have increased between the 1880s and the 2010s: there is divergence. In Table 1, there are two thirds more statistically significant differences for individual features in the 2010s than in the 1880s. In Table 2, the aggregate distances between the three courts have almost all increased by all measures.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 15)

Go to annotation “Third, there is no obvious odd one out, which implies that there is no obvious division between these three courts into common law court (England) and civil law courts (France and Germany). If England were the odd one out, this should be visible,” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 15)

Go to annotation “France is indeed the odd one out if we turn from quantitative to qualitative differences. France is categorically different from England and Germany in that it has literal zeroes for two out of three entire clusters of features: citations to cases and literature.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 15)

Go to annotation “Fourth, between England and Germany, differences are of degree not kind. There is nothing that one court does that the other does not do at all. For example, the German court already distinguished cases in the 1880s, even though this is often said to be something that civil law courts do not do.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 15)

B. THE NUMBER OF AUTHORITIES

Nessa seção os autores apresentam 4 gráficos com a distribuição das referências de casos, legislações e doutrinas citadas. São gráficos interessantes e que demonstram a opinião de que os tribunais alemães e ingleses tem similaridades.

Go to annotation “By contrast, England and Germany look similar at this resolution. In particular, the graphs disprove the notion that German courts used to ignore precedent, or that English courts used to ignore literature and not deal with statutes. Of the twenty English opinions from the 1880s, six cited legal literature and eleven cited statutes; this has only increased in the 2010s. Of the twenty German opinions from the 1880s, only five did not cite a past case, which is remarkable because the German court back then did not have any obvious body of established precedent to fall back on (supra III.C)” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 16)

C. HOW COURTS ENGAGE WITH THE AUTHORITIES

1. Cases

Ao analisar como as cortes lidam com precedentes, os resultados apontam para o fato de que a corte alemã cita precedentes de forma sumária apenas, ao passo que a Inglaterra analisa os fatos e as razões expostas nos precedentes.

Além disso, os resultados demonstram que tanto na Alemanha como Inglaterra há pouco overruling e que há distinções, principalmente na Inglaterra.

Go to annotation “The overall picture that emerges from Figure 2, consistent with much writing in the comparative literature (e.g., Bell 1997), is that the English court engages much more carefully with the prior cases than the German court. As in prior studies of German courts (Wagner-Döbler 1995), almost all the German court’s references to prior cases are summary citations, by which we mean a simple mention of a prior case as supporting a legal position of the citing court. The German court almost never mentions the facts or the reasons of the prior cases. By contrast, the English court very often does so.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 17)

Go to annotation “This more nuanced approach of the English court also manifests in how it deals with cases in tension with its position. Both the English and the German courts overrule precedents at similarly low rates. But the English court openly distinguishes prior cases many times more often than the German court. These differences are not absolute. The German courts do distinguish and they do discuss facts and reasons of prior cases. The English courts often cite prior cases without referencing their facts or reasons. Nonetheless, there is a stark difference in degree.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 18)

2. Statutes

Go to annotation “In line with prior qualitative research, we do not find stark differences in the courts’ approach to statutes, at least between England and Germany. France is a categorical outlier even here: while the French court cites statutes—albeit less often than its English and German counterparts—it never quotes them, never mentions legislative history, and never explicitly engages in interpretative work (as opposed to merely stating how it reads the statute).” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 18)

3. Literature

No sec. 19 na Inglaterra e Alemanha se citava pouca doutrina, na França nenhuma. No sec. 21 houve um aumento massivo de referências doutrinárias na Alemanha que não apenas faz citações para reforço de argumentos como discute posições contrárias para rejeitá-las também.

Go to annotation “In the 1880s, if there was a gap, it was between France on the one side and England and Germany on the other. The reason is that, then as now, the French court simply does not cite literature. By contrast, the English and German courts always did, although both did so rarely in the 1880s.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 19)

Go to annotation “In the 2000s, however, the German court engages with literature much more intensively than the English court, let alone the French. The German court does not merely cite literature in support of its position, which the English court does too, albeit less frequently. The German court cites literature even when it does not support the court’s position. In fact, the German court often engages and explicitly rejects contrary views in the literature. In the English apex court, this is, if not unheard of, exceedingly rare.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, pp. 19-20)

VIII. DISCUSSION

Os autores demonstraram como a noção de que o common/civil law seriam diferentes mas que estariam convergindo é uma noção equivocada. Das três jurisdições analisadas a que mais se diferencia é a francesa, inclusive em relação à alemã.

Go to annotation “Our findings challenge the perceived wisdom that common and civil law are different but converging. We repeat that while we only have three jurisdictions and opinion data, these three jurisdictions are central for the common/civil law distinction (supra II), and opinions of apex courts are what most writers point to as “evidence.”” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 20)

Go to annotation “To be sure, one can measure a difference between common law (England) and civil law (France and Germany) in our data. But this does not mean much: one can measure a difference between any one and the remaining two vertices of an equilateral triangle, even though all are equally (in)distinct from one another.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 20)

Go to annotation “Importantly, we did not “rig” this result by adding an outlier, France. Of course, if two specimens are quite different but one adds a deviant third, the first two will tend to look similar. The French court is notorious for being terse and not citing any authorities besides (barely) statutes. Judging by categorical differences, France is indeed the odd one out. However, by many of our distance measures, France is closer to England than Germany is.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 21)

Com relação à prática das decisões judiciais, o estudo demonstrou que no civil law também se usa de precedentes, mas de forma diferente, como já sustentam alguns autores. Na Inglaterra se faz uma análise mais acurada dos fatos e razões expostas nos precedentes, enquanto na Alemanha, cujo uso quantitativo é próximo ao da Inglaterra, o uso é de natureza mais geral, sendo que mesmo na Alemanha também se faz, em algum grau, distinções e superações.

Go to annotation “Turning to specific alleged differences between common and civil law, i.e., particular uses of particular authorities, our results are mixed. For cases—i.e., precedent—our data refute the vulgar myth that civil law does not use precedent: the German court cites it even more than the English (while the French, of course, cites none). However, our data are consistent with the nuanced view that civil and common law use precedent differently. As discussed in Section VII.C.1, the English court engages much more carefully with prior decisions, in particular their facts, than the German court does. This is consistent with the notion that common lawyers use precedent to reason inductively and from analogy, whereas civil lawyers extract principles (...). The former requires facts, the latter does not. An extreme manifestation of this is the practice in some civilian jurisdictions to publish some cases only as head notes.28 It has also been remarked that civil law systems do not have a developed method of distinguishing, perhaps because of the absence of a formal rule of stare decisis (...). This is not a categorical difference—German courts do distinguish, discuss precedent facts, etc., while use of precedent as principles is not alien to the common law. But it is a significant difference nonetheless.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, pp. 21-22)

Quanto às referências a legislações, a França é um ponto fora da curva, já que não cita nenhuma, e não foi encontrada grandes diferenças na Alemanha e Inglaterra.

Go to annotation “For statutes, we do not find big differences between the English and the German court, but it is not clear if we should have expected any. (The French court is once again an outlier.) Civil law is identified with codification (supra II). But statute and code are not the same.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 22)

Outro ponto que ficou demonstrado foi que, no Sec. 19 nenhum dos tribunais tinha um grande diálogo com a doutrina, o que afasta a impressão de que no civil law os doutrinadores teriam importância maior que no common law. Porém, nas decisões do sec. 21, a Alemanha teve uma diferença muito grande, já que tem um diálogo intenso com a doutrina, não apenas nos reforços argumentativos, mas também para explicar os motivos pelos quais não adota uma posição, para refutar um entendimento doutrinário.

Go to annotation “Two widely held clichés are contradicted by the fact that English and German courts cited literature about equally (rarely) in the 1880s. The first cliché is that English courts did not cite legal literature” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 22) (…) Go to annotation “The second cliché is that the civil law is (more) heavily shaped by scholars, especially in Germany (David & Brierley, p. 22; Van Caenegem 1987, p. 63; Vogenauer 2006; 2018). If this is the case, the French and German courts did not reveal it in the 1880s.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 22)

Go to annotation “By the 2010s, however, the German court very much conforms to this second cliché. As discussed supra VII.C.3, the modern German court extensively engages the literature even when it disagrees with it. The court seems to find it necessary to explain why it does not follow the literature; it does not merely rely on it for support.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 22)

Algumas dessas mudanças poderiam ser explicadas pelas mudanças tecnológicas, que facilitaram o acesso às fontes.

Go to annotation “Some of the changes over time are presumably driven by technology. Today’s opinions are about three times as long as in the 1880s. This could reflect that legal systems have become more complex. But it might simply be due to the ease of automated text processing. The added length explains some, but not all, of the increase in citations to authorities (cf. Table 1B). We speculate that an additional explanation is access. In the past, lawyers were limited to a small number of books in their offices and, if they were lucky, a physical library. Legislative materials were not published in a reliable and readily accessible manner until the late 19th or even the early 20th century, which explains why no court cited them back then (Vogenauer 2001, pp. 646-7, 920). Today, every lawyer has all legislation, including its official history, virtually any case, and much literature available at the click of a button. The volume of literature has increased massively, especially in Germany.” (Kunstreich et al., 2024, p. 23)

IX. CONCLUSION

Na conclusão apenas ressaltou que o artigo conseguiu desafiar, não refutar, a noção de que o common e o civil law são sistemas essencialmente diferentes, conforme demonstrado por meio das análises de decisões de cortes de vértice e estatísticas.