It doesn't "lean more" towards civil law, it is a civil law legal system. Nevertheless, precedent ("jurisprudence") is still part of the legal framework. The c

It doesn't "lean more" towards civil law, it is a civil law legal system. Nevertheless, precedent ("jurisprudence") is still part of the legal framework. The cour de cassation, the highest court of appeals, has rendered a judgement about something which is ambiguous in the law. This is a judgment about a particular case in a particular situation, and judges are explicitly forbidden from writing anything in their judgment that would look like a general statement. Lower courts are independent and can render different judgments in similar cases if they interpret the law and the situation presented to them differently. So why does it matter that the cour de cassation created this precedent? Well, it's the highest court of appeal. Any lower court who judges differently sees clearly the "risk" that their judgment is appealed, passed on to the cour de cassation, overturned, and needed to be judged again. We have professional judges in France, and they recognize there is little point in wasting the State's resources on such things without good reason. But because we are in a civil law country, it is quite likely that the existing law will be clarified and supplant the precedent. In a civil law country, precedent is always subordinate to codified law.