This paper tells how, starting from the seven-nineteenth-century codification of continental law – the very origin of what jurists call legal formalism
– three processes of de-formalization of law have developed: three losses of the general-and-abstract form that law received by the codification. The first process is internal to the national States: codification was followed first by the multiplication of special laws, then the proliferation of para-legislative sources (decrees, regulations, soft law...), up to today’s regulatory entropy. The second process is first European and then international: the formation of a supranational law that has undermined the national systems of sources. The third process, no less pervasive but more recent, is digital, and comes from processes of computerization of law that generates risks of dis-humanization still further than the previous ones. All this shows at least five different ways of understanding law as a form or, more simply, five different senses of “legal formalism”.
