L’équité hors du droit

Abstract

The colloquium on “L’équité hors du droit” organised by D. Mantovani at the Collège de France provided an extension of the lessons on the Roman history of equity and allowed a study of the presence and development of equity in contemporary disciplines. The sixteen presentations, guided by the two trajectories proposed by D. Mantovani, one focusing on Antiquity, the other examining the refraction of equity through the prism of the contemporary, permitted to draw a coherence and to build a dialogue between the different approaches and thus to reactivate the ancient notion of equity. By distinguishing equity from equality and justice and especially aequitas from epieikeia, the following conclusion was reached: aequitas is a decision-making criterion and epieikeia, a direction for interpreting and adapting the law to the concrete case.