LEGAL CAUSES
There was, to begin with, a purely legal cause, i.e. the intrinsic quality of the Corpus iuris and the medieval teaching it produced. European law in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was archaic, feudal, provincial, harking back to the Germanic tribal past, and administered orally.
Very little was put in writing, and of law schools, lawbooks and legal treatises there was very little: only some poor, unsophisticated and shapeless attempts, guided neiÂther by central legislation nor by great central law courts. The ius commune, by contrast, offered everything the archaic â€?first feudal age’ lacked. Its great lawbook contained the best the Romans, the most gifted jurists the world had ever seen, had written down. Its language was elegant and technical, the norms and ideas clearly formulated and presented in a structured, systematic way: the sheer quality of the Digest was bound to dazzle people who were looking for the best law available. The teaching of the Schools produced professional jurists, Roman-canonical procedure deÂmanded professional judges, and papal legislation, often emaÂnating from law professors, sustained the rise of a law, as required by logic and progress. To people who were used to parochialism, the universality of Roman law must have been impressive: here were a legal system and a legal science that had belonged and could belong again to the whole civilized world. The vision arose of a law that was timeless and literally utopian, in the sense of belonging to no particular place. The definition of contract and of the obligations it creates, and the enumeration of the other sources of obligations - these were abstract and self-evident data, which seemed to flow from reason itself and to be equally valid in ancient Beirut or medieval Bologna and Orleans. What a shock people must have felt who compared the helpless and shapeÂless attempts of the Leges Henrici Primi to present, in â€?Latin’ that was understandable for Anglo-Normans, the Old English dooms with the Institutes of Justinian or the writings of such classical jurists as Modestinus or Ulpian![97] And how revealing was the discovery of a court procedure based on rational enquiry and ignorant of the ordeals of water and iron and judicial combat (which was not much more than a slightly camouflaged fight to the death between the parties in â€?litigation’)!
More on the topic LEGAL CAUSES:
- The Juridification of Cause Advocacy in Socialist Asia: Vietnam as a Case Study, John Gillespie
- THE IUS COMMUEE A GOOD THING?
- Formulary Procedure
- Caenegem R.C. van.. European Law in The Past and The Future: Unity and Diversity over Two Millennia. Cambridge University Press,2004. — 185 p., 2004
- Persistent Arguments and Conflicts
- The Growth of Legal Science
- Introduction
- Edda Frankot has shown that the burgh records of Aberdeen provide a rich repository of information about maritime trade and its legal regulation in the fifteenth century.1
- That western Europe would one day discover Justinian’s lawÂbook was to be expected: renewed contact with the Greek world and the Crusades - inter alia to Constantinople - would have seen to that.
- Donation