Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  14

  1 In the French criminal justice system, sentencing judges are responsible for both imposing and carrying out sentences as well as deciding on parole and postincarceration monitoring.

  2 The tribunal d’instance is the lowest rung in the civil area of the French legal system, something like our small claims court, a court of original jurisdiction for minor civil litigation in which proceedings are usually oral and litigants are not required to be represented by an attorney. Unlike judges in the U.S. legal system, French judges are not impartial referees between plaintiffs and defendants but are instead trained to actively investigate charges as well as render decisions. A juge d’instance thus must engage with all sorts of human misfortune, face-to-face with plaintiffs who are often angry, alone, impoverished, and at their wits’ end. Ideally the judge has at least a passing familiarity with many aspects of modern life, since in theory the next case could deal with anything at all.

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  1 The United States uses the common law system that evolved among anglophone peoples, a system firmly established by custom before laws were written down and codified, and the injustices of which could eventually be amended through the petitions of citizens. In a way, common law grows from the bottom up. France, by contrast, uses the civil legal system, in which legislation is the primary source of laws, which thus spring not from a catalog of judicial decisions but from written codes and statutes that must then be strictly applied to the legal problems of daily life. In such a system, law develops from the top down.

  So while the American common law system explicitly acknowledges case law as a major source of jurisprudence—judges in selected courts may interpret and make law through decisions that can be cited as precedents—law in France is statutory, and French judges may not make law, only narrowly interpret it. The radical effort of “the judges in Vienne” to render justice by actually creating jurisprudence should be understood within this context.