As you know, English and French lawyers can rely on a syllogism to structure their reasoning and solve issues. They can always find a solution to any problem they face by finding whether a statement is true or false. The context of a given matter stops however the lawyer from reducing a matter to a purely logical issue.1 Vulnerability for instance is not a matter of data2 and cannot be logically processed to become either true or false. I keep writing on this blog that the protection of the beneficiary's interest in English law makes trusts unique.3 French lawyers struggle to balance an old approach of incapacity that still affects the management of the estate of the incapacitated person4 with a modern one that favours autonomy over substitution5. Interestingly, major pieces of domestic legislation that clearly support the modern view can be used to support the old one.6 This illustrates that the logical structure of French private law that follows that of the French Civil Code aims at completeness and yet remains incomplete without interpretation.
The same can be said about Prolog that is based on binary logic as the French Civil Code is and is also incomplete.7 A civil lawyer understands better the logic behind such interpretation changes as he discovers symbolic artificial intelligence.
- Incapacity, autonomy, and substitution are legal concepts that may be stable while the way practitioners combine them changes over time. These changes are not purely logical. Legal concepts can be seen as dots, nodes, or vertices that are connected by the lawyer.
- Vertices on a graph are virtually countless and yet legal concepts that stand the test of time are not many.8
- A French lawyer who deals with civil law keeps pacing up and down what he regards as the Code even if there are more and more Codes.
- The way a graph or the Code is searched matters a lot.
In brief, it is worth bearing completeness in mind when looking for a practical solution that involves French civil law.
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See Sorting apples or turning homes into castles especially at 2.2. ↩
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See Vulnerability and data. ↩
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Parallel report of the Defender of Rights as part of the examination of the initial report by France on the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. July 2021, esp. p. 4. https://www.defenseurdesdroits.fr/rapport-parallele-du-defenseur-des-droits-dans-le-cadre-de-lexamen-du-rapport-initial-de-la-france, ↩
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Flach, Peter, and Sokol, Kacper. "Simply Logical -- Intelligent Reasoning by Example (Fully Interactive Online Edition)". Zenodo, 3 August 2022, §2. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.1156977. ↩