The distinction between rights and remedies is a traditional and undebatable premise. It supports the classic account of civil law and common law as an inference from the role played by law in protecting rights and providing remedies. While civil law systems protect individual rights to the extent they are previously laid down by the legislature, common law systems authorize courts to employ their decisions to adapt the existing legal rules to the overwhelming social changes. Civil law courts are depicted as declarative and remedies as legislative response to concrete questions. Instead, common law courts are viewed as creative and remedies as judicial response. 

Whether or not this account is legally picturesque as a general matter, it is ill-suited to describe the current reality of civil law and common law systems. Courts are increasingly called to reinterpret their role by overcoming the limits of the written law and giving import to constitutional values and judicial precedents. Adaptive interpretations of legal rules and deference to prior decisions are massively becoming the new guidance for resolving disputes. These changes reduce the distance between civil law and common law systems. In civil law countries, remedies gradually cease to be considered consequences of legislative choices; they become judicial responses extending their scope beyond the written law. 

Changes, however, are not revolutionary. Instead, they are incremental. The scope of the law is gradually increased. New remedies defer general principles like constitutional precepts. Judicial precedents coherently govern new interpretative developments. The legal system seems to be self-regulating like never before. The doctrine of res judicata is a crucial example of this evolution. By comparing how legal systems construed this doctrine, it emerges that the distinction between rights and remedies should be reframed as an overarching theory allowing issue preclusion in general terms.