How can we envisage a European legal culture? Legal history proposes models of common law that presuppose legal particularities. Comparative law, on the other hand, postulates an interface between distinct legal systems. Comparative legal history seeks to trace how the interactions of different social groups, in different and partly overlapping political orders, have contributed to the formation and development of law, notably through the formal 'sources' of law. Whatever the level of political governance, the legal instruments it creates and uses always have their own particularity. Whatever the density of this governance, the particularity of its law is always confronted with the actors of other public governances, sometimes in its internal order, sometimes in its external relations. The comparative history of law enables us to recognize, over the long term, the shared foundations of normativities that are necessary to ensure that this confrontation can take place peacefully.
The colloquium brings together jurists and legal historians from different European legal traditions, who have had the experience of devoting a large part of their work to legal systems other than that of their initial training. For periods ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day, their work bears witness to the conditions under which a legal culture manages to incorporate and transcend the particularistic interests that have marked the development of rights in Europe.