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The New European Legal Culture - Ten Years On, Martijn W. Hesselink

Martijn W. Hesselink

This is a postscript to The New European Legal Culture which was written for the Chinese translation almost a decade after the original essay was published. That essay argued that Europe was facing a shift from a rather formal, dogmatic and positivistic approach to a more substance-oriented and pragmatic approach to private law. Ten years on, has the trend towards a new, less formal legal culture in Europe been confirmed or is there now a reverse tendency? As this paper points out, the picture is mixed: there are both examples of neo-formalism and new examples of a more substantive approach …