GERMANISTS AND ROMANISTS

Thibaut’s appeal eventually won the day and the young German empire quickly undertook the task of providing the new nation state with national codes, of which the Civil Code was to be the crowning achievement.

lawbooks in order to discover the roots of true German law. The Romanists studied the Corpus iuris and the Schools to which it had given rise in medieval and modern Europe and especially in post-Rezeption Germany, in order to build a system of private law that was technically perfect and the best basis for the law of a German empire that was destined for great achievements. Neither group was moved by purely antiquarian or speculative curiosity or interest in the past as such, as they both saw their respective fields of study as contributing to the quest for the best Civil Code for their country: the legal past was directly rele­vant to the legal future. Both camps conducted their research with earnestness and erudition: it is hard to realize nowadays what enormous efforts went into the critical edition of Roman­law texts — first and foremost the ultimate edition of the Corpus iuris civilis itself — and of medieval charters, capitularies and law­books — many of which are still used in every legal history seminar today. Since both the Roman and the German tradition could boast impressive monuments, both camps had solid arguments for their convictions.

The famous nineteenth-century debate on German and Roman law nowadays belongs to the past - as does the de­bate about codification (at least on the Continent). However, some rumblings can still be occasionally overheard at legal his­tory conferences, where, on the whole, both customary and the �learned written laws’ are unemotionally studied as any other historical phenomenon. I still remember my surprise when, at a conference in Paris many years ago, the late Professor Pierre Timbal, who led a team at the Archives Nationales in Paris to study the registers of the Parlement of Paris, in a sudden out­burst criticized his fellow legal historians for paying too much attention to the ius commune and the medieval Law Faculties and neglecting the study of customary law, which, as he rightly ob­served, �was the law that regulated the daily lives of the vast majority of our ancestors, who had never heard of Bartolus or Baldus'. And is it too far-fetched to compare the German debate on the Germanic and Roman ingredients of their future code to the present debate (which we presented earlier) on the possible integration of civil-law and common-law elements in a future European private law?