Structural Elements of the System of Canon Law

THE NEW SYSTEM of canon law that was created in the eleventh and twelfth centuries embraced only those kinds of legal relations that fell within the jurisdiction of the church as a corporate legal entity.

Because none of the coexisting legal systems claimed to be all inclusive or omnicompetent, each had to develop constitutional standards for locating and limiting sovereignty, for allocating governmental powers within such sovereignty, and for determining the basic rights and duties of members. In the canon law system, these constitutional standards were expressed primarily in terms of corporation law, including the law of corporate jurisdiction over particular classes of persons and particular types of subject matter.

Out of the system of ecclesiastical constitutional law there gradually developed relatively coherent bodies of substantive rules pertaining to other fields of law as well. Thus there gradually developed, out of the church's jurisdiction over the sacraments, a body of law pertaining to marriage; out of the church's jurisdiction over testaments, a body of law pertaining to inheritance; out of the church's jurisdiction over benefices, a body of law pertaining to property; out of the church's jurisdiction over oaths, a body of law pertaining to contracts; out of the church's jurisdiction over sins, a body of law pertaining to crimes and torts. There also developed, in connection with these five types of jurisdiction, a body of rules of judicial procedure. These bodies of law were not conceptualized in the same way that autonomous branches of law came to be conceptualized in later centuries; the canonists of the twelfth and thirteenth

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centuries did not attempt to organize each branch of law________ property, contract, crime, and so forth

__ as a self_contained set of rules stemming logically from various principles and doctrines, which stemmed in turn from a general theory of property, a general theory of contract, a general theory of crime and punishment, and so forth.

Each of the subsystems or fields of law manifested its own structural elements, and each manifested in a different way the structural elements of the system as a whole. The canon law of crimes, for instance, was founded on concepts of sin which affected all the other fields of canon law. In the other fields as well, one can identify pervasive features that helped to define canon law as a modern legal system.