If the most realistic way of Europeanising private law consists of the enforcement of Community directives, then one must admit that scholarly writings have not been realistic at all. For whether judges have enforced the directives should be the single most important matter to investigate, but it has remained outside the reach of scholarly contributions which ponder instead other issues of lesser historical importance. The purpose of this article is to break this scholarly silence. It shows that the attempt to Europeanise private law by means of the directives has been a failure, as the directives have been disregarded in the courtrooms of continental countries. In some decisions judges have taken into account the directives, yet refused to enforce them and decided the cases on the basis of pre-existing national law. In other decisions judges have not taken into account directives' rules that were of relevance and should have been applied. Judicial disregard becomes really intelligible if one considers a set of practices of legal actors in continental Europe. Here a working partnership between judges and professors characterises the organisation of private law, a partnership which did not take place with respect to the enforcement of the directives, with the consequence that judges did not revise national law in the light of the directives.
European Review of Private Law