The French response to the World Bank's Doing Business reports

In its 2004 and 2006 Doing Business reports, the World Bank endorsed the conclusions advanced in the 'legal origins' literature, according to which legal systems belonging to the common law tradition better foster economic performance than systems belonging to the civil law tradition, and systems within the French family fare the worst among civil law systems. This article comments on the response offered to those reports by a group of French legal academics. The author suggests that this response would be more effective if it treated as separate issues (1) the traditional resistance of French jurists to the economic analysis of law (EAL), (2) the efficiency of the French legal system, and (3) the merits of analysing French law from an EAL perspective. With respect to the first issue, the author argues that the reasons behind the French jurists' traditional resistance to EAL are largely sociocultural and, accordingly, can be expected to bear directly on French jurists, and French legal thought more generally, but only minimally on the economic pedigree of the French legal system. With respect to the second issue, questions are raised as to the possibility of reliably assessing the relative efficiency of entire legal systems, whether the French or any other. With respect to the third issue, the author notes that the objections raised against economic assessments of entire legal systems do not apply to the more traditional form of EAL, which accordingly remains as valuable a tool for analysing French law as it is for analysing any other body of law.