It is apt to say that Europe, or at least the Europe of the European Union, is currently experiencing a comparative moment. To quote from Nietzsche, ours is the ‘age of comparisons’. For the first time, the two legal traditions represented in Western Europe – known to anglophones as the ‘civil law’ and the common law - find themselves interacting with one another within a general legal framework, that of the Treaty of Rome. Of course, there has long been mutual influences and interferences. For instance, one can convincingly argue that the ancient common law was but a by-product of an earlier form of the civil law. In the words of Raoul van Caenegem: