► Full reference: M.-A. Frison-Roche, “Les nouveaux territoires du droit” (The new territories of Law), keynote in Conseil national des barreaux (CNB – French National Bar Council), Convention nationale des avocats 2026 (2026 National Lawyers’ Convention), plenary session 2 Ce qui nous tient : le droit comme promesse collective (What holds us together: Law as a collective promise), Toulouse, MEETT, 23 October 2026.
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🧮 This ten-minute talk is part of the second plenary session of the National Lawyers’ Convention, devoted to Law as a collective promise.
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🖥️ The slides supporting this conference will be posted shortly.
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► Presentation of this conference: What happens now happens within companies, including for issues that are not “economic”, with new interlocutors, the “stakeholders”, and with a primary concern: the future, that of systems and that of the human beings who live within them.
The new territories of Law are those where decisions are formed and which Compliance Law grasps: governance, conformity and vigilance, sustainability, data, value chains and the new contractual engineering, reputational risks; wherever long-term decisions are made, where responsibilities are allocated, where credible commitments are made. Everyone sees new missions there, for managers, stakeholders, politicians, auditors, judges, lawyers, and even professors, but everyone also feels overwhelmed by unmanageable regulations (NIS 2, DORA, FCPA, DSA, Sapin II, DMA, CSRD…).
Lawyers must be present in this ex ante space, to bring out the humanism on which these compliance corpora are founded, to help build lasting alliances enabling companies to play their part in the compliance ambitions, and to organise the new evidentiary culture of all parties, so that the flow of information is credible in amicable, pre-litigation and litigation relationships.
This requires particular qualities from the lawyer entering this new territory, which leads from the ex ante towards a new kind of litigation. Law appears there as an alliance, and the lawyer as the one who creates the link so that the European ambition of Law as the cement of systems holds.
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