lus Commune

The influence of Roman law in the modern world is immense: it constitutes the historical and conceptual basis of many legal systems throughout the world. Its impact has not been confined to those countries in Western Europe that historically formed part of the Roman Empire.

Given the importance of law as a fundamental element of any society, the con­tribution of Roman law to modernity is all embracing. It is not just in the concepts, substantive rules, and doctrines of law that the influence of Roman law has been felt, but also in civil procedure and technique, particularly as regards the clas­sification of law and the science of casuistic analysis, The lawyer with a grasp of the fundamentals of Roman law has a passport to the understanding of the law and legal systems of many countries. For Roman law has twice in the past fulfilled the function of a ius commune—the communal law of a large part of the world. The first time, at the height of the Roman Empire when 'all the world was Rome'. The second life of Roman law as a ius commune began at the end of the eleventh century. With the scientific rediscovery of Roman law in Italy and its transforma­tion and adaptation by Italian and French jurists during the next two centuries, medieval learned law (a combination of Roman and canon law interspersed with local custom) rose to become the ius commune of late medieval Europe. As Coing, H., 'The Roman Law as Ius Commune on the Continent' (1973) 89 LQR, 505-17 as well as Mayali, L„ 'The Legacy of Roman Law', in Cambridge Companion, 374-95, have noted, this does not mean that there was a single homogenous body of law extending across Western Europe during this period. The term European ius com­mune (in its historical sense) merely signifies that, from the fourteenth to the start of the sixteenth centuries, most of Europe shared a common legal tradition. Many local and regional variations on the law existed, but the terminology, concepts and structure provided by elements of Roman law provided a common framework (see Herzog, Short History, 75-92).