Scholarship in law (la doctrine) plays a more important role in the civil law tradition than in the common law tradition given the existence of a code, the formal style of judgment writing and the pervasiveness of the view of law as legal science Since the late eighteenth century, civil law scholarship in Quebec has gone through at least six phases, but only now does it seem to be emerging from the inward-looking didactic posture it has maintained since the turn of the twentieth century. Today, the prognosis for fundamental research in Quebec is excellent as a new generation of scholars trained in the humanities and social sciences shows renewed interest in private civil law subjects.