Since the late 1940s, economic considerations relating to the globalisation of world markets have led an ever larger group of Western European countries to unite in the quest for a supra-national legal order which, in time, generated the European Community. Most of these countries' legal orders claim allegiance to what anglophones are fond of labelling the “civli law” tradition,1 although two common law jurisdictions joined the Community in the early 1970s. The European Community's early decision to promote economic integration (and, later, other types of integration) through harmonisation or unification has involved, at both Community and national levels (for the implementation of Community rules in the member States carries the adoption of national rules in all member States), a process of relentless “juridification”; law, in the guise of legislatively or judicially enacted rules, has assumed the role of a “steering medium”.2 This development was foreseeable: once the interaction among European legal systems had acted as a catalyst for the creation of a supra-system,3 the need to achieve reciprocal compatibility between the infra-systems and the supra-system naturally fostered the development of an extended network of interconnections (such as regulations and directives) which eventually raised the question of further legal integration in the form of a common law of Europe.4

There is a widespread belief in this country that while England and the other common law countries have an adversarial system of civil procedure, continental countries use the inquisitorial system. The fact is, however, that the only kind of situation in which a truly inquisitorial procedure can be envisaged is exemplified when a policeman who, arriving at the scene of a fracas, opens the proceedings with the time honoured formula, ‘What's going on here?’ Short of that, there is nothing to which an inquisitorial judge can direct his inquiry unless and until a complaint of some kind is addressed to him. Even writers on French administrative law, whose procedure is claimed to be inquisitorial, find it difficult to avoid language that might be thought more appropriate to an adversary system. So for example, it is said that notice of the complaint must be given to all those whom the claimant indicates as his opponents.

Three main tasks can be identified for comparative law. The first is to investigate differences between legal systems and, in particular, to distinguish between “real” differences, where the outcomes of the application of principles diverge between legal systems, and “superficial” differences, where similar outcomes are masked by the conceptual structures of the relevant systems. The second is to trace developments in the relationships between legal systems and thus to explore tendencies of convergence or divergence (in terms of “real” differences), noting that in some areas convergence may be required under international legal instruments. The third task is to explain and to evaluate such developments: why do systems converge or diverge? Is convergence desirable or undesirable?

For a long time it looked as though comparative law was a matter for academic research, difficult and, surely, very interesting; beautiful to know something about, but not immediately relevant to the daily life of the law. Practising lawyers would admit the importance of comparative law in theory, but they would add that they themselves were, of course, too much occupied with the latest cases on trade marks, or with recent developments in the law of negligence.1