How Jean-Guy Belley Thinks: A Translator’s Note

Why has Quebec proved such a fertile ground for the study of legal pluralism over the last generation? It is not that formalism in law is any less tenacious in Quebec than elsewhere, or that the state-made law is held in lower esteem. If anything, the fabled cult of enactment that characterizes modern civilian methodology has been exacerbated in the run-up to the adoption of the Civil Code of Québec and the twenty years since that moment. The mixed nature of Quebec legal sources, given that mixité is seen as much as a historical fact as the basis for a way of knowing law, cannot explain the wealth of scholarly attention devoted to diversity in law.¹ Whether Quebec’s brand of pluralism for law comes from factors such as linguistic and cultural diversity, an ongoing contact with Aboriginal law, or a special experience with religious law is a matter of ongoing speculation.² But in the final analysis, it is not unfair to think that legal pluralism has flourished in Quebec because of the work of a handful of imaginative scholars who have invested their talent in this intellectual project.³

Professor Jean-Guy Belley is plainly one of their number.⁴ His work as a theorist of legal pluralism is celebrated in Quebec and well read in France.⁵ Yet his prodigious scholarly output is less well known elsewhere in Canada, where that work would likely be understood to have special relevance. Indeed, over the past ten or so years, Professor Belley has placed increasing emphasis on Anglo-American legal scholarship and common-law sources in his teaching and thinking about law. The translation of the foregoing essay has therefore been prepared at once as a respectful homage to a friend and colleague and in the hope that, in a modest way, it might encourage a wider readership for his important work.

Professor Belley’s essay “What Legal Culture for the Twenty-First Century?” was written in 2001, at a moment that marked an important turn in his career.⁶ Jean-Guy Belley had taught Obligations and Sociology of Law at Université Laval from the late 1970s until about the time he submitted the article for publication. At Laval, he produced a substantial body of work that reflected methods and insights in legal sociology that can be traced to the influence of his thesis adviser, Jean Carbonnier, whom many view as France’s pre-eminent legal thinker of the twentieth century.⁷ During those years, Professor Belley used the general theory of contract as a setting to explore how the sociological method commanded an approach to the sources of law that was at odds with the prevailing dogma in the civil law faculties in Quebec.⁸ Drawing on continental thinkers and extending special attention to the work of Ian Macneil, Professor Belley introduced a generation of students to trends in legal theory that they would not otherwise have encountered in private law.⁹ He wrote a major socio-legal study at the end of this period of his career, bearing on business practices in a single industry, that Canadians interested in the relational contract as a tool for social ordering would do well to consult.¹⁰

From about 1999, Professor Belley set to one side this focus on legal sociology and devoted himself more resolutely to the theoretical foundations of pluralism in law. This coincided with his appointment as Sir William Macdonald Professor of Law at McGill University and a period during which his energies were absorbed by the “trans-systemic” law teaching project embraced by that university’s Faculty of Law.¹¹ His impact on that program of study as an intellectual endeavour has been most meaningful.¹² This paper captures some of that moment of his transition from legal sociologist to theorist, as well as signalling, in an early form, themes that would dominate his concerns over the coming decade. One senses in this essay, for example, Belley’s growing conviction that legal pluralism has been deployed to the advantage of business organizations, rather than of...