Lambert, Edouard (1866–1947)

In the early 1920s, Edouard Lambert emerged as the leading figure in comparative law in France. His contribution was twofold: (1) replacing the traditional method of comparative statute law with a method capable of explaining the role of law in society, defined in terms of comparative case law, and (2) making the study of law a social science.

After having obtained his doctorate in law in Paris in 1893, Lambert joined the Lyon law faculty as a professor. Named director of the Khedive School of Law in Cairo in 1906, he left the following year because of a conflict with the British authorities in Cairo, which created a diplomatic incident between France and England. Upon his return to France, Lambert arranged [Page 909]for his Egyptian students to join him in Lyon. He created an oriental legal studies seminar that predated his Institute of Comparative Law, created in 1921.

Until his retirement in 1938, Lambert surrounded himself with collaborators close to Émile Durkheim's (1858–1917) sociology, among them Emmanuel Lévy (1871–1943) and Paul Huvelin (1871–1943), and supervised an impressive number of doctoral dissertations in law by French and foreign jurists that were then published by the Lyon Institute of Comparative Law.

Lambert's involvement in comparative jurisprudence and his respect for the sociological jurisprudence of Roscoe Pound (1870–1964) took shape over a long period. In 1900, Raymond Saleilles (1855–1912) entrusted Lambert with the concluding remarks of the international congress of the Société de législation comparée in Paris. The Lyon legal scholar then began his reflection on the existence of a legislative common law, a product of history shared by juridical systems of “civilized” nations. Knowledge of foreign statute law allowed him to seek specific legal solutions to common questions and, for France, to renew the methods of the legal doctrine.

In his Le gouvernement des juges (1921), Lambert changed his views. Previously critical of comparisons of statute law that provided only a static view of law; he came to defend an organic concept of law centered on the observation of court rulings. It is before the courts, after all, that the social interests of advanced societies confront one another and positive law and social transformations meet. Influenced by the legal thinking of Pound and by sociological jurisprudence, Lambert developed an interest in the regulation of corporations and public utilities, as well as in the methods of teaching law.

Several of Lambert's collaborators were close to Durkheimian sociology, and Durkheim even wrote a favorable review of Lambert's work La fonction du droit civil comparé (1903). Lambert did not intend to establish a connection between law and social science. Instead, he treated law itself as a social science: He attempted to renew legal methods from the inside. The legal practices of courts, capitalist enterprises, and the administration revealed a social engineering open to the socioeconomic demands expressed in the worlds of economy, labor, and trade. Legal doctrine must understand law in this context and situate at its core the observation of law in action.

The method of comparative case law and the dynamic vision of law in society did not outlive Lambert. French legal thinking did not shed its formalism or elevate the status of case law; it remained indifferent to comparative law. Lambert suffered from the cognitive dissonance common to French legal scholars, while François Gény (1861–1959), whose Mélanges Lambert had directed, proposed a more prudent, and therefore more acceptable, vision of case law. Perhaps for these reasons, Lambert is still better known abroad than in France.

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