Best practices and the legal value of standards

Obviously, we're confining ourselves here to French law, and generally to Community law.

The rules of the trade, whether for products, organization or processes, are either written documents or self-evident, imperative customs. And when it comes to making a choice, engineers and magistrates will rationally prefer to refer, if possible, to written customs, i.e. more often than not to standards.

In this way, the industry standard – written rule – becomes ipso facto a source of law and a reference for rules of the art.

In principle, standards are technical specifications whose application is voluntary, not to be confused with standards and labels (*). But the boundary between standards and regulations is becoming increasingly blurred. On the one hand, some standards are mandatory by law; on the other, some European...