Preface to the English-language edition
Private law is concerned with individual men and women whose relations, one hopes, will be harmonious; otherwise the courts intervene and settle their disputes peacefully and authoritatively.
Since this extensive and pervading body of law regulates our daily lives, we may well pose the question as to how and when it was created. If we all happened to live under one and the same civil code, conceived and rapidly penned by Napoleon, the answer would be wonderfully simple. Legal history unfortunately is not that straightÂforward: one complication is that the law of our present-day western world consists of two quite different systems, English Common Law and continental civil law, also called the law of the Roman- Germanic family. How these legal systems, both of European origin, came into being, went through various stages of development and always remained alien to each other is one of the themes of the present Introduction, where the continental lawyer may learn something about his own heritage but also about events across the Channel, and vice versa. At a time when Britishjudges sit with their continental brethren in European courts of law, this may be especially welcome. National legal histories are readily available, and so are works on Roman and canon law - my Introduction is, of course, largely based on them - but studies that transcend national frontiers and attempt to weave the historic threads of common and civil law into one fabric are still rare. This may go some way towards justifying the present survey, which is the fruit of my teaching in the Law Faculties of the Universities of Ghent and-during the acaÂdemic year 1984-85 - of Cambridge.This short book, which covers the period between the sixth and the twentieth centuries, does not attempt to present an analysis of the substance of private law, but merely an external history, explaining who were the great lawgivers, jurists and judges who shaped it, and what texts their endeavours produced. The legal norms themselves are only occasionally discussed, in order to illusÂtrate factors which influenced the course of events.
I hope that the English-reading world will welcome this attempt, and judge that the trees felled to produce the paper on which to print it have not fallen in vain.
It is my pleasant duty to thank the translator, Dr D. E. L. Johnston, who has devoted much of his precious time to this ungrateful task. I would also like to thank the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press who, having welcomed several of my earlier manuscripts, have once again decided to publish my work under their illustrious imprint.
Ghent r. c. van caenegem
More on the topic Preface to the English-language edition:
- Preface to the English-language edition
- Caenegem van R.C.. An historical introduction to private law. Cambridge University Press,1996. — 224 p., 1996
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- Preface
- 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