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52 U. Cin. L. Rev. 124 (1983)
Rene David: An Introduction

handle is hein.journals/ucinlr52 and id is 144 raw text is: RENE DAVID: AN INTRODUCTION William Jeffrey, Jr. * Professor William Jeffrey, Jr., joined the faculty of the College of Law in 1956, and teaches courses in comparative law, legal history, law and social science, and Soviet legal systems. He has a particular interest in making available to American lawyers and scholars the works of prominent non- American legal scholars through translation; the two articles which follow exemplify this interest. Ren6 David is the foremost French scholar in comparative law today. Professor David began his teaching career in 1929 at Grenoble. In 1943, he moved to the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris, from which he retired to the University of Aix-Marseilles in the late 1970's. In addition to his magnum opus, published in English as Major Legal Systems in the World Today (2d ed. 1978), Professor David has been a leader among Western scholars who work in the field of Soviet law. With Professor John Hazard, of the Columbia University School of Law, he published the two-volume Le Droit Sovioftique in 1955. Within the field of what Professor David terms Western law, he has illuminated English law not only for a popular readership but for his fellow French comparatists as well; in a reversal of direction, he has thrown much light on French law for English-reading comparatists, most notably in his elegant and concise French Law: Its Structure, Sources, and Methodology translated into English in 1972 by Professor Michael Kindred. Professor David's major concern has been to create a system for classifying the great variety of particular legal orders providing com- paratists with a useful and accurate taxonomy of legal systems. The result of this concern is his classic Major Legal Systems in which he offers a scheme for classifying legal systems. Professor David perceives three great families of legal systems: the Romano-Germanic, the socialist and the common-law. For the remaining contemporary legal systems, Professor David establishes families of religion-based sys- tems (Islamic, Hindu and Hebrew), Far Eastern (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) and African. In the two studies introduced by this note, Professor David con- tinues the elaboration and refinement of his classification in Major Legal Systems. The first study considers conceptual and classificatory * The translator acknowledges with gratitude the able assistance rendered to him in this project by the editors of the Review.

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