exam week revelations never cease: EU Law
Standing back and looking back on Werro's EU Law class as a whole totally changes my perspective on it.
At the time, I would just sit in class and be bored by what seemed like gear-spinning discussions of the ECJ's seemingly-arbitrary interpretation of Directives. We were just harping on the same points over and over again, while the cases' subject matter was getting progressively less interesting: we started with liquor regulations and sex discrimination, and ended up with consumer credit and package holidays, ugh.
But as I type up my course outline, all that redundancy takes on a new character. It's that the professor was actually using the ECJ cases we read to make a consistent overarching point.* For once, a course that isn't just a survey, but a pointed exegesis!
Then it struck me: This is what I should expect of a Continental professor. See, the Civil-Code-based Continental legal tradition relies on law professors to tell judges and lawyers what the law means, instead of how the Anglo-American common-law tradition looks to doctrines developed in previous cases. That means that European professors get paid not so much to teach as to develop legal theory: hence, they tend to do little actual teaching, and students study for exams not by going to class, but by reading the professor's book.
In retrospect, I really appreciate this class much more than I did at the time.
I didn't get it then. I kept operating under the American law-class model: take notes on the cases. But in this exam, Werro's going to be much more interested in what we think as legal scholars than as litigators. Which is cool now that I realize it, but I didn't realize it earlier, and so I'm left now with that much more work to catch up putting all the theoretical pieces together.
Also, I think this exam is only 1.5 hrs long. What?!?
* For anyone interested, the Thesis of the Class went something like this, in my summation:
In the early to mid-1990s, the European Union transitioned out of its previous phases of market integration and entered the current phase of reconceptualization of the Union as a constitutional order.
At the same time, the European Court of Justice shifted markedly away from deferring to Member States' traditions concerning private law (a.k.a. contract, tort, and property law). Instead, the ECJ became much more aggressive in its construction of EU legislation, freely striking down divergent aspects of Member States' private law, e.g. by mandating exemplary damages, abolishing liability caps and fault requirements, and forbidding Member States to stipulate their own exemptions from private liability.
This smoothing-out of discrepancies among Member States' private-law systems effectively results in a harmonized European private-law order. The eventual conclusion is a European Civil Code, even though no one is ready for such a concrete step toward federalization yet.
Fascinating, now that I get it.
At the time, I would just sit in class and be bored by what seemed like gear-spinning discussions of the ECJ's seemingly-arbitrary interpretation of Directives. We were just harping on the same points over and over again, while the cases' subject matter was getting progressively less interesting: we started with liquor regulations and sex discrimination, and ended up with consumer credit and package holidays, ugh.
But as I type up my course outline, all that redundancy takes on a new character. It's that the professor was actually using the ECJ cases we read to make a consistent overarching point.* For once, a course that isn't just a survey, but a pointed exegesis!
Then it struck me: This is what I should expect of a Continental professor. See, the Civil-Code-based Continental legal tradition relies on law professors to tell judges and lawyers what the law means, instead of how the Anglo-American common-law tradition looks to doctrines developed in previous cases. That means that European professors get paid not so much to teach as to develop legal theory: hence, they tend to do little actual teaching, and students study for exams not by going to class, but by reading the professor's book.
In retrospect, I really appreciate this class much more than I did at the time.
I didn't get it then. I kept operating under the American law-class model: take notes on the cases. But in this exam, Werro's going to be much more interested in what we think as legal scholars than as litigators. Which is cool now that I realize it, but I didn't realize it earlier, and so I'm left now with that much more work to catch up putting all the theoretical pieces together.
Also, I think this exam is only 1.5 hrs long. What?!?
* For anyone interested, the Thesis of the Class went something like this, in my summation:
In the early to mid-1990s, the European Union transitioned out of its previous phases of market integration and entered the current phase of reconceptualization of the Union as a constitutional order.
At the same time, the European Court of Justice shifted markedly away from deferring to Member States' traditions concerning private law (a.k.a. contract, tort, and property law). Instead, the ECJ became much more aggressive in its construction of EU legislation, freely striking down divergent aspects of Member States' private law, e.g. by mandating exemplary damages, abolishing liability caps and fault requirements, and forbidding Member States to stipulate their own exemptions from private liability.
This smoothing-out of discrepancies among Member States' private-law systems effectively results in a harmonized European private-law order. The eventual conclusion is a European Civil Code, even though no one is ready for such a concrete step toward federalization yet.
Fascinating, now that I get it.