Paris in America is the title of the English version of a philosophical novel published in 1863 by the Collège de France jurist and founder of the Société de législation comparée, Edouard Laboulaye. Under the name René Lefebvre, this plea for liberty and the American model of government was a veritable bestseller (thirty-five French and eight English editions).
Laboulaye had begun his lecture in 1849, at a time when the United States was not on the syllabus, but he was fascinated by American democracy and devoted himself to the study of the American constitutional system. He became a trustee of the Collège de France, and played an active role in the construction of the Statue of Liberty.
Borrowing this title from him is both a way of paying tribute to him, in the bicentenary year of his birth (1811-1883), and of celebrating the continuity of Franco-American exchanges on democracy and systems of law.
After an initial sequence devoted to Laboulaye and the methods of comparative law, "American Democracy and Comparative Law", we will return to "The Constitutional Judge and Democracy" in a debate organized around Stephen Breyer, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on the occasion of the publication in France of his latest book entitled in French "La Cour suprême, l'Amérique et son histoire". The nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have the power to block legislation passed by elected representatives. So where does their legitimacy come from? How did the justices earn the trust they enjoy? And how do they contribute to greater democracy? To explain this, Stephen Breyer looks back at history, evoking the dispossession of the Cherokee Indians, the status of slaves, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and school desegregation in Little Rock during the struggle for black civil rights. He also focuses on the contemporary role of the Supreme Court, from the election of George Bush to the fate of prisoners.
Collège de France
