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Yeah, Cassation Court is a sort of sub-Supreme Court. It has the ability to break rulings (French casser, hence the name) if the law wasn't well done, or if the
by pm3003 3y ago
Yeah, Cassation Court is a sort of sub-Supreme Court.
It has the ability to break rulings (French casser, hence the name) if the law wasn't well done, or if the wrong law was applied to the case, or if some judicial norms (laws, basic rights, jurisprudence) were not balanced correctly in a ruling ; It does not rule on the facts of the case, only on the way it was judged.
Rulings of the Cassation court are usually applicable as case law, which is much less common in continental legal systems than it is in Common Law legal systems.
By the way, the French legal system has two main circuits ("orders") : the judiciary order (penal and civil) and the administrative law order, which handles disputes and trials between government entities (local, regional, or national), and between government entities and private entities (in most cases). The equivalent of the Cassation court in the administrative order is the Conseil d'Etat.
- dmoy 3y agoSeems cool I'm just psyched to learn it has multiple separate subject-matter segregated appeals courts. Always looked like a saner approach than geographically separating circuit courts. Get judges with more specialized expertise in various areas.
- belorn 3y agoThere are benefits but also drawback to such system. The benefit is as you say that judges have more specialized expertise, which also mean that other judges don't need to dive deep into expert areas outside of their own. The drawback however tend to be a much higher risk of regulative capture, especially in areas of patent and copyright. A general judge might have a easier time creating a balance decision than a judge who been previous been working as a expert lawyer for large companies for several decades. The above events illustrate this a bit by how they lost on first instance because the system assumed that cases are about commercial entities which has contractual obligation between them. It took the supreme-like court that is specialized on legal procedures, rather than a court specialized on contract, to see the issue in the correct context.
- dmoy 3y agoOh interesting, are French judges appointed based on their prior law practice expertise? In the US there is that problem somewhat, with the cafc. But probably <50%, it also has a lot of academics and government lawyers too.