The Law School at Bologna
The newly discovered texts of Roman law were copied and began to be studied in various cities of Italy and elsewhere near the end of the eleventh century. Students would come together and hire a teacher for a year to expound them; the legal form adopted was that of a partnership (in Roman law, societas) of professor and students.
One teacher in particular, named Guarnerius but known historically as Irnerius, who began teaching at Bologna in northern Italy in about 1087, gained preeminence, and students flocked to him from all over Europe. 2His school sur--123-
vived his death. Modern estimates of the number of law students at Bologna at any one time in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries range from 1,000 to 10,000. 3_
Being aliens, most of the students were in a precarious legal situation. For example, any alien might be liable for the debts of any of his fellow countrymen. A Bolognese merchant with a claim against a London merchant could exact damages from any of the English law students at hand. To protect themselves against these and other hazards, the students banded together in "nations," on the basis of their ethnic and geographical origin -- the Franks, Picards, Provenals, Alemanns (Germans), Angles, Spaniards, and others, altogether some twenty or more nations. Finally, they united in two corporate bodies, or guilds, one comprising all students from north of the Alps and the other all those from south of the Alps, with each of the two groups being organized in the form of a universitas -- a term of Roman law then given the meaning of an association with legal personality or, in today's terminology, a corporation. The professors were not members of the student universitas.
The virtues of incorporation were obvious to the students of Bologna, teenagers who by medieval standards were mature young men ready for an active political life.
United, they could bargain effectively with the city government and also dominate the administration of the school. Bologna was the archetype of the medieval student-controlled institution of higher learning -- in contrast to the professorially controlled university that was founded a little later in Paris. The name "university" was ultimately given to all such institutions. Originally, the term applied to the university in today's sense, that is, the entire institution or enterprise, was studium generale ("general education"), signifying education available and accredited generally, not only locally. It was not necessary that there be several "departments": a faculty of theology or of law might itself be called a studium generale.The student universitas, or corporation, or guild, received from the city of Bologna a charter which permitted it to make contracts with the professors, to regulate the rents of student lodgings, to determine the kinds of courses to be taught and the material to be covered in each, to set the length of lectures and the number of holidays, to regulate prices for the rent and sale of books. The professors were paid directly by the students in their respective classes.
The student guild was also given wide civil and criminal jurisdiction over its members. Thus students were exempted from the civil disabilities of alienage and acquired, in effect, an artificial citizenship of their own.
The charter of Bologna provided that the student guild should be responsible for "the cultivation of fraternal charity, mutual association and amity, the care of the sick and needy, the conduct of funerals and
the extirpation of rancor and quarrels, the attendance and escort of our candidates for the doctorate to and from the place of examination, and the spiritual welfare of members." 4 _
The professors formed their own association, the college of teachers, which had the right to examine and admit candidates for the doctorate -- and to charge examination fees.
Since the doctor's degree was in effect an admission into the teaching profession, the professors retained the power to determine the membership of their own guild, but that was about all. If the students felt that a professor was not fulfilling his teaching duties, they would boycott his classes and refuse to pay him. And if a lecture did not begin promptly when the opening bell rang, or if it concluded before the closing bell, or if' the course of lectures was not covered by the end of the term, the professor was fined by the student guild.The governing board of the student university was a general council, to which each "nation" elected two members. The general council elected the rector, each nation having the right to nominate a candidate for that post. The rector had to be at least twenty-four years old and had to have been in residence for five years. The baccalaureate (bachelor's) degree was awarded by the rector. A committee of students, called Denouncers of Professors, was appointed by the rector to report professorial irregularities.
The general council ruled by majority vote. Large issues were acted on by an assembly ("congregation") of all the students, attendance at which was compulsory, with each student having the right to speak and to vote. The general council had the power to enact university statutes. The statutes regulated the economic affairs of the institution, including fees and salaries, cost of renting books, housing, and conditions of money lending; they also regulated both student and professorial discipline as well as many aspects of the curriculum. A major limitation on student self-government, however, was the rule that no statute adopted by the assembly could be changed until twenty years after it had been enacted except by unanimous consent of both the students and the professors.
The source of student power was in part economic. The students -either sons of wealthy families or else supported by foundations (usually monasteries) -- brought a very large income to the city.
If they were dissatisfied they could easily migrate, taking the professors with them. Since the dormitories, dining halls, and lecture halls were owned by the city or by local entrepreneurs rather than by the students, the departure of the students could cause a severe economic crisis. In later times the professors came to be paid by the city and were bound by oath to the city not to depart. This development brought a sharp decline in student control over the university.-125-
The ecclesiastical hierarchy also played an important role in controlling legal education. Except in the Italian cities, education throughout Europe in the twelfth century was supervised by the eccle siastical rather than by the secular authority. However, in 1219, more than a century after Bologna had been started, the pope decreed that nobody there should be installed in the office of teaching (that is, should receive the degree of doctor) without being examined by, and receiving a license from, the Archdeacon of Bologna. In fact, the archdeacon (or in the case of other Italian universities, under similar papal decrees, the bishop) did not himself ask questions but rather presided over the examination. Nevertheless, the papal decree of 1219 deprived the doctors of their independent role in granting degrees, and the church's licentia docendi ("licence to teach") was henceforth required in Italy as elsewhere. In many parts of Europe the remote control of universities by bishops led to periodic student revolts.
Historically more significant than episcopal control of the universities, however, was their relative freedom from such control, as compared with preexisting educational institutions. Prior to the eleventh century, formal education in Europe had been carried on almost exclusively in monasteries. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, cathedral schools were formed and gradually achieved preeminence. The cathedral being the seat of the bishop, the cathedral school was under his immediate supervision, just as the monastic school was under the immediate supervision of the abbot.
A teacher would hardly dare to contradict his bishop or his abbot. The University of Bologna, on the other hand, is said to have been founded when Matilda, Duchess of Tuscany and friend of Pope Gregory VII, invited Irnerius to teach Roman law there. For over a hundred years, then, the teaching at Bologna was free of direct ecclesiastical control. There was, to be sure, substantial indirect pressure; Irnerius himself is said to have been excommunicated because he supported the imperial cause against the papacy. Yet, in general, Bolognese jurists were free to support opposing views concerning the extent to which various provisions of Roman law justified imperial and papal claims. Meanwhile, in Paris in the early 1100s, Peter Abelard dared to contradict his bishop and to teach a "countercourse" against him. It was out of this confrontation that the University of Paris emerged in the twelfth century. 5Thus the European universities established themselves from the beginning as educational institutions where professors were free to take opposing positions. This was in contrast to the earlier system, known since antiquity, under which each school had been dominated by a single teacher or a single theory.Bologna was also, from the beginning, a university in the sense that it was a graduate school; that is, most of the students had previously received an education in the liberal arts, usually at a monastic or
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cathedral school. There the curriculum consisted of the seven "liberal arts": grammar, rhetoric, logic (also called dialectics), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. However, many of the schools concentrated on the first three, called the trivium, based chiefly on the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, and some parts of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other Greek and Roman writers. Study of the liberal arts was a prerequisite, from the twelfth century on, to the study of the new "sciences" of law, theology, and medicine.
(When, as at Paris, liberal arts became a fourth university discipline, its study remained a prerequisite to the other three.) Bologna did not at first embrace a faculty other than law, and when eventually other faculties were formed there, there was no constitutional connection among them except that all students received their degrees from the same chancellor, the Archdeacon of Bologna.The Bologna system of legal education was transplanted to many other cities throughout Europe, including Padua, Perugia, and Pisa, Salamanca and Montpellier and Orleans, Prague, Vienna, Cracow, and Heidelberg. 6_Most universities north of the Alps, however, although they followed Bologna's law curriculum and teaching methods, adopted the type of organization initiated at Paris, where doctors and students of all four faculties -- theology, law, medicine, and the arts -- were embraced in a single body and made subject to a common head and a common government. 7_At Oxford, Vacarius, who had been trained at Bologna, taught Roman law in the mid-1100s, although apparently a law faculty as such was not established at Oxford (and another at Cambridge) until the next century.