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Keeping It Private SCHWARZSCHILD.DOC 11/9/2007 9:31:14 AM Keeping It Private MAIMON SCHWARZSCHILD* Public law adjudication has grown dramatically in recent decades in many English-speaking countries. In the United States, intensely controversial questions of public policy—on race relations, abortion, sexuality, the place of religion in public life, and much else—have been tried as constitutional questions and decided by court order. In other English- speaking countries, where it was rare until recently for public questions to be decided in court, judges are increasingly making public law—influenced perhaps by America, and encouraged by the adoption of international treaties, especially on human rights, whose provisions are often general and leave much, if not virtually everything, open to interpretation.1 In other areas of law, by contrast—in everyday tort, contract, and property cases—court decisions are typically much less dramatic and seldom, if ever, announce controversial innovations in public policy. Yet in these cases, too, there lurk implicit questions of social justice. What force, if any, should existing social baselines and expectations have? What account should a court take of whether a litigant is rich or poor, manager or worker, corporation or individual, landlord or tenant? Is freedom of contract just or unjust? Does justice not require promoting equality? And if so, how and in what sense? In common law countries, perhaps not surprisingly, tort, contract, and other private law cases are often decided on common law principles— * Professor of Law, University of San Diego. Affiliated Professor, University of Haifa. This Article appears in somewhat different form in Symposium, The Role of Policy in Private Law Adjudication, 25 U. QUEENSLAND L.J. (SPECIAL ISSUE) 215 (2006). 1. See, e.g., European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Nov. 4, 1950, 213 U.N.T.S. 221 (substantially incorporated as domestic law in the United Kingdom, Human Rights Act, 1998, c. 42 (Eng.)). 677 SCHWARZSCHILD.DOC 11/9/2007 9:31:14 AM principles developed by courts incrementally over time rather than laid down by statute. Common law has a style and ethos of its own.2 It is based on precedent and, although precedent is open to modification, the common law style is anything but impetuous. With roots in the nineteenth century and earlier, common law often reflects classically liberal ideas, more or less consciously and more or less robustly. Instead of approaching private law cases with a common law mindset, should judges not treat these cases the way they might treat public law cases? Should courts not promote a vision of justice and human rights through private law adjudication, just as they might do—or might wish to do—in notable public law decisions, whether or not the vision might be controversial and whether or not it might mark a break with common law tradition? This Article suggests several reasons why they should not. Turning private law more public in such a way would have considerable costs in legal stability, transparency, legitimacy, and in judicial habits of neutrality and impartiality. Each of these considerations, in turn, is associated with what is generally thought of as the Rule of Law. The classically liberal ideas in the common law bloodstream themselves have at least some association with political freedom and the Rule of Law, as well as with economic prosperity. And even if one is sceptical about classical liberalism, one might reflect that, to the extent that there is public acceptance of ambitious public law adjudication, it might depend at least in part on the credit that courts build up through morally and politically unambitious day-to-day common law adjudication. I. There is a sharp distinction between public and private law in continental civil law, and in the legal systems around the world more or less modeled on the Napoleonic codification—or misapprehension—of Roman law.3 In civil law countries, public and private law are typically adjudicated in separate court systems, under separate legal codes; public and private law are taught as separate subjects to law students, and the distinction is a basic piece of mental furniture for civil lawyers. In English-speaking common law countries, by contrast, the distinction between public and 2. See generally David Sugarman, Legal Theory, the Common Law Mind and the Making of the Textbook Tradition, in LEGAL THEORY AND COMMON LAW 26 (William Twining ed., 1986) (examining the history of teaching common law, and why common law predominates today in legal education). 3. See Peter G. Stein, Roman Law, Common Law, and Civil Law, 66 TUL. L. REV. 1591, 1595 (1992) (reflecting on the civil law distinction between public and private law, and the uncertain links between Roman law and Napoleonic civil law). 678 SCHWARZSCHILD.DOC 11/9/2007 9:31:14 AM [VOL. 44: 677, 2007] Keeping It Private SAN DIEGO LAW REVIEW private law, and even the terms, are alien and seldom used by lawmakers, judges, or practising lawyers. Legal academics in common law countries sometimes take up the idea, but with an awareness—gratifying or otherwise—that it has a foreign flavor. Private law in a civil law country means the law governing individuals and private organizations and their relations with each other, as opposed to the public law governing the government and its relations to its citizens. In a common law country, private law would translate, more or less, to the law of tort, contract, property, inheritance, as well as many aspects of family and commercial law. In common law countries, private law has mostly been a matter of common law, and to a considerable extent it still is. This is not quite the truism, or the tautology, that it sounds. Most English-speaking countries are common law countries, in the sense that their legal systems are derived from England, home of the common law. But not all law in a common law country is common law. In England itself, law and equity have long coexisted. And common law more narrowly means non- statutory, judge-made law, developed in case decisions which follow or modify the precedents of earlier decisions. Statutory law is not common law in this sense, although common law countries certainly have statutes, enacted at an accelerating clip in the last century.4 Actually, the distinction between statutory law and common law is clouded by the fact that statutes in a common law country—and for that matter constitutions, regulations, and other legal instruments—are interpreted and applied by judges with a common law training and cast of mind, thus, in something of a common law style. How strictly or freely common law judges interpret statutes may vary from time to time and place to place. English courts in the twentieth century read statutes very literally, whereas American courts had a freer, more common law style, which is to say they exercised more lawmaking power even in statutory cases.5 Still, in 4. See GUIDO CALABRESI, A COMMON LAW FOR THE AGE OF STATUTES 2 (1982) (arguing that courts should have more power to update today’s plethora of statutes); GRANT GILMORE, THE AGES OF AMERICAN LAW 95 (1977) (noting a twentieth-century “orgy of statute making”). 5. P. S. ATIYAH & ROBERT S. SUMMERS, FORM AND SUBSTANCE IN ANGLO- AMERICAN LAW 96, 100–01 (1987). See also Maimon Schwarzschild, Class, National Character, and the Bar Reforms in Britain: Will There Always Be an England?, 9 CONN. J. INT’L L. 185, 206–12 (1994) (arguing that the unrepresentative upper-class character of the English Bar and judiciary impelled twentieth-century English judges to interpret 679 SCHWARZSCHILD.DOC 11/9/2007 9:31:14 AM principle, statutes are not common law; and in practice, even if judges have some freedom to interpret statutes, they have less freedom to make law in cases controlled by statutes than in cases where there is no statute. Hence the distinction between common law and statutory law, even in common law countries—or rather, only in common law countries, since under civil law there is, at least in principle, nothing but statutory law. For many centuries in England, and well into the twentieth century there and in other English-speaking jurisdictions, the law of tort and contract—the heart of private law—was mostly judge-made common law, with statutes few and far between. Even today, much of the law of tort is common law, and although contract law in the United States is substantially governed by the Uniform Commercial Code, the UCC itself is largely a codification or restatement of common law doctrines and rules.6 This has had significant policy implications for private law in common law countries. Common law rules and precedents are not random in their public policy tilt. Common law is strongly associated with liberal ideas. Among these ideas are: - Private autonomy; - Private property; - Neutrality or abstraction of legal rules: equality before the law; - Legal stability and predictability. Private autonomy and private property are implicit to some extent in any contract law, but common law contract doctrines particularly lean toward freedom of contract and enforcing the expressed will of the parties—a practical way of respecting autonomy. Tort responsibility also implies at least a degree of moral responsibility and autonomy. Moreover, common law tends toward general or abstract rules which do not respect persons; contract law does not typically ask, “What kind of commodity is the contract about?,” or “Who are the parties?” Nor does the outcome of a common law tort case typically depend on who is the tortfeasor or what kind of person is the victim. Finally, common law puts a premium on stability and predictability; these are implicit in the notion of precedent, which is fundamental to common law.
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