This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
It is tempting to treat civil law as one tradition and leave it at that, but the abuse-of-rights doctrine is a clean demonstration of how much genuine variation sits underneath that single label. France and Germany reach broadly the same practical result, a court can refuse to give full effect to a right exercised abusively, by two routes that are conceptually quite different, and the difference is not merely academic; it shapes what a lawyer actually has to prove.
The French abus de droit, built by the Cour de cassation case by case from the mid-nineteenth century onward with no explicit Napoleonic Code provision behind it, asks primarily about the rightholder's purpose: was the right exercised with harmful intent, or in a way that has drifted from the social and economic function the law granted it for in the first place. That is, at bottom, a question about motive and misuse of function. German law's unzulassige Rechtsausubung asks a different question, rooted in Section 242 of the Burgerliches Gesetzbuch's general duty of good faith: does this particular exercise of the right, in this context, offend the standard of fair dealing the legal relationship between these two parties calls for, regardless of exactly why the person is doing it. German law also keeps a narrower, separately codified rule sitting beside that broader good-faith inquiry, Section 226's chicane prohibition, which bars exercising a right for the sole purpose of injuring another, a rule closer in spirit to the French intent-focused test but deliberately kept narrow rather than generalized.
Switzerland's Civil Code took the boldest drafting choice of the three, writing a general abuse-of-rights principle directly into Article 2, and comparative scholarship notes that codified general clauses like it, in Switzerland as elsewhere in the civil law world, have only rarely been relied on in practice, with courts more often reaching an equivalent result through other, more specific doctrines. The lesson for anyone comparing legal families is not that civil law systems agree with each other and disagree with common law; it is that even two systems descended from a shared Roman law inheritance and sitting a few hundred kilometers apart built genuinely different doctrinal architecture to reach a result they both, independently, decided their sense of justice required.