Contenu du sommaire : Cultures juridiques et pratique de l'enquête en sciences sociales

How can we explain that judges' criticisms do not transform the practices of their own court? According to the actors of the International Criminal Court, it is a matter of legal culture. Because of the domination of common law, judges cannot control the prosecution policy, which relies on the will of international diplomacy and established powers. While describing and understanding this explanation, the author enquires about legal cultures in action. He shows how they interact with the call for the rationalization of justice and he concludes that the jurisdiction's institutional weakness makes the force of law it produces and undermines the possibility for judges to publicize their criticisms, which could endanger the Court's façade of unity.

From the 1850s to the 1870s, English merchants campaigned for the introduction of commercial courts based on continental-European models. The courts were however not created. This paper discusses why the campaign was launched and why it failed. It points to the effect of a legal culture that does not correspond to the usual definitions of common law; the English culture was very different from that of the United States. It is still useful to use the phrase “legal culture” to describe interactions between four elements that hindered the transfer: the definition of important procedures by lawyers; the distant respect toward law displayed by merchants; their limited access to courts; and their self-categorizations (which involved more differences than similarities among merchants).

Observing the political construction of new transnational judicial institutions sheds light on a “dramaturgical” use of the notion of legal culture. This essay explores this use in the negotiation, by a collegial oligarchy of harmonizing judges and corporate lawyers assembled in a “conclave,” of a new intellectual property regime in Europe based on the design of the new transnational Unified Patent Court. The analysis of controversies between these judicial entrepreneurs, of their social networks selecting ex ante leaders, and of the ways in which they represent their compromises and sacrifices in their negotiations, shows that economic stakes, more than legal cultures in a patrimonial sense, shape this dramaturgical use characterizing transnational institutionalization processes.

Can we understand the professional trajectories of international legal elites as the reflection of different legal cultures, in which different factions organize and confront each other? The prosopography of the judges of the International Court of Justice highlights the construction of a weakly autonomous field of international law, structured by several professional divisions. While some professional groups within certain cultural configurations have privileged access to the Court, the variations in the judges' profiles according to geographical origins can be explained first by a cross-history of the national and international fields of international law.

Throughout 2018, the debates on French higher education focused on reforming access to the university (“Parcoursup reform”). But in the meantime, the government was preparing to jeopardize the very pillars of the French University as they were established from 1968 onwards. The decree issued on December 12, 2018 allows universities to become “experimental institutions” and to override the rules governing their organization. This decree is the outcome of a lengthy process of dismantling every major feature of the French University. To understand what is at stake, we need to look back at 1968 and the reforms of the last decade.

Often underscored to differentiate the grandes écoles from the university, the links that unite higher education institutions to companies are, however, rarely questioned in their concrete modalities. This article examines the presence of representatives of the business world on boards of directors of higher education institutions and questions the way in which their place is negotiated. The article highlights, on the one hand, the weight of the legal framework linked to the statutes of these institutions, thus helping to rethink the border between universities and grandes écoles. On the other hand, it shows that beyond various legal frameworks, the selection of business representatives on the boards reflects a diversity of appropriations, corresponding to the position of the institutions, but also to the negotiations within management teams.

The Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly was revised in 2012, to include the obligation to frequently visit parents (OFVP). It calls on the Confucian tradition of filial piety. According to official discourse, countered by the authors, the practices of filial piety have declined in China. Through a study of the OFVP, the authors show that while filial piety faces new challenges, it remains highly valued in Chinese society. Chinese judges adopt a highly contextual approach to the implementation OFVP, taking into account the parties' situation.

Since the early 2010s, the notion of gender identity has been the subject of a multifaceted appropriation in international, European and national law, forming the premise of a new and little studied body of law—gender identity law. Taking as a starting point the adoption by France in 2016 of legislative provisions integrating and mobilizing this notion in positive law for the first time, our analysis seeks to identify the issues involved in the emergence of a new legal regulatory space that is strongly intertwined with contemporary social categorization processes. This genesis highlights the existing tension between the progressive adoption of a gender identity framework centered on self-identification on the one hand, and the constraint of objective identification inherent in a judicialized system on the other.