THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL AND PANDECT LAW
§ 3 The 19th century brought about a substantial change in the role of Roman law in western Europe. In Germany, the so-called Historical School, the chief exponent of which was Savigny,1 displaced the natural law school, and saw a return to the historical approach to the Roman law in order to understand the evolution of legal institutions.
In fact, the writers and teachers of this school of thought gave a positive law approach to natural law and contemporary application of Roman legal principles to the current scene.[2] [3] [4] The disciples of the Historical School became the leaders in the movement known as Pandect law, so-termed from the Greek title for the Digesta of the emperor Justinian, the primary source of the substance of the Roman law which has been preserved to us. These writers and teachers employed the systematic structure of the law which had been worked out a century earlier/ developed the whole complex of legal rules and institutions to fit the emerging modern life, largely on the framework of the historical development of institutions which had been worked out by the efforts of their teachers; a system of law which resembled that of the natural law school in that it purported to take care of any novel legal situation that might arise.[5] [6] It has been said, that both ‘the common law and Pandect taw certainly merit the attention of modem jurists; they constitute an arena for legal education and a model for dogmatic elaboration, representing the more immediate historical antecedents of modern civil law. But they pertain to the history of modern law rather than to Romanistic science; they have nothing to say with respect to Roman law*.[7] [8]The influence of the Historical School spread to France and Italy - as well as to Britain and the United States - and Pandect law constituted the fundamental course in Roman law in much of western Europe during the last quarter of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries. But outside of Germany it served rather as a historical complement to the national legal system than as a model for a comprehensive code of private law.*
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