Judicial Reasoning

Abstract

This chapter examines judicial reasoning in France. In France, the long-established assumptions, still deeply rooted in the French legal mind, that only the legislature can make the law and that codes provide a self-contained and internally consistent body of legislation, have greatly contributed to the deductive model of legal reasoning which prevails in the French judicial method. In such a system, codes are deemed to provide the axioms and postulates from which conclusions are drawn. From this it follows that judicial decisions cannot, overtly at least, be the outcome of what the judge feels to be the best solution. They are primarily the result of applying a rule of law to an actual situation. However, the chapter shows how in practise judges has been able to introduce value judgement in their decisions despite the constraints of the system.