GENERAL PRINCIPLES AS SOURCES OF LAW IN THE MAJOR CONTEMPORARY LEGAL SYSTEMS

Abstract

In the post-war European legal culture, the gradual movement
of the general principles of law from a sporadic public international
law concept towards a mainstream, even fashionable, category has
been brought around mainly through the jurisprudence of the
European Court of Justice. The reasons for the latter s interest in the
general principles of law, whether they were about the need to remedy
the deficiencies of an incomplete and dynamic legal system, or a
conscious effort to strengthen the evaluative element of the applicable
law, remain for scholarly assessement. Unlike previous European
experience, where the common core of various legal systems has been
confned primarily to the private law sphere, a range of widely shared
constitutional and administrative law principles began to emerge.