14 Lessons learned from the Principes directeurs

Nonetheless lessons can be learned from the Principes directeurs. The most important is that the many fundamental principles listed in the introduction to the Interim Outline Edition can be organised and presented in a more effective way. A small group of them (corresponding to some extent to those identified in the Principes directeurs) can be extracted and discussed at greater length. These are the principles which are all-pervasive within the DCFR. They can be detected by looking into the model rules. They are underlying principles. They furnished grounds for arguments about the merits of particular rules. The remaining principles mentioned in the introduction to the Interim Outline Edition are generally of a rather high political nature. They could be said to be overriding rather than underlying. Although some of them are strongly reflected in parts of the DCFR, they are primarily relevant to an assessment from the outside of the DCFR as a whole. Before commenting briefly on these two categories of principles we note only that another lesson to be learned from the Principes directeurs is that there are different ways of dealing with fundamental principles in an instrument like the DCFR. It will be for others to decide how if at all to deal with fundamental principles in an official CFR. One obvious technique would be to use recitals, but the form and content of these would depend on the form and content of the instrument. It would be premature to adopt that technique here.