Carbonnier, Jean (1908–2003)

For over a half century, Jean Carbonnier embodied, within the international community of jurists, the French “specificity” in civil law, legal sociology, and the science of legislation. He held the Chair of Civil Law at the Poitiers Law Faculty (1937–1955), where [Page 159]he served as dean, before moving to Paris (1955–1976). He was also president of the editorial committee for the journal L'Année sociologique.

Carbonnier succeeded Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965) as lecturer in legal sociology at the Sorbonne in 1965, before introducing this subject to the Paris Law Faculty, where he headed the Laboratory of Legal Sociology, originally established by Henri Lévy-Bruhl (1884–1964). He supported the creation of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (ISA), as well as the foundation of the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, participating in its inauguration, where he chaired the 1989 opening panel together with Renato Treves (1907–1992) and Masaji Chiba.

Nevertheless, Carbonnier considered legal sociology an auxiliary science, in the same way that legal psychology or legal ethnology are all branches of (general) sociology, whose raison d'être is to study legal phenomena as social facts. He believed that law could be divided into four sciences: systematization, interpretation, creating norms, and sociology of law. In contemporary societies, legal sociology contributes to law by setting down guidelines for legislative policies. Legal sociology includes three pillars that provide a better understanding of law. First, it supports an appropriate method to increase information on law, especially through legal pluralism. Second, it supports a normative function that assumes law is not a foreign body within its social environment. Finally, it provides a means of action (in both theory and practice) intended to prepare legislation and to verify the law's efficiency.

Carbonnier had the opportunity to implement these ideas as a legislator. He reformed the French Civil Code related to family matters (1964–1970), introducing equality of children, divorce by mutual agreement, and new matrimonial systems. On this occasion, breaking with more than a century of “rational” legislation, he recruited sociologists and used field research, a method he considered appropriate. Leaving aside the image of the legislator locked up in an ivory tower, he turned to listening to society, even though he believed that ethnocentrism had some virtue, such that family law would project a national tradition. He remained within the French sociological tradition even though he was distant about the use of field sociology (practicing “sociology without rigor”). He considered that he did his ultimate work, as a jurist, not in the street, but in his office.

Carbonnier brought to legal sociology cultural references from other fields, such as philosophy, history, and theology, which are today part of the cultural inheritance of French-speaking jurists. These include comments on collective memory and the rooting of law in customs and religion, his bipolar conception of reality, skepticism toward law, and concepts about internormativity, effectiveness or noneffectiveness of law, infralaw, vulgar law, nonlaw, and legal pluralism. At an epistemological and ethical level, his skepticism borrowed from Calvinism. His ironical perception of law's limits as a means for social regulation may still help us to successfully tackle some of the thorniest questions at stake in sociolegal research and legal policy.

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