The thousands of students from all over Europe who had studied at Bologna and other Italian universities conveyed to their own countries the new legal learning based on the revived Roman law.
Throughout Western Europe (in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland), universities were established where scholars trained in the methods of the Glossators and the Commentators taught the civil law on the basis of Justinian’s texts.
Their students formed a new class of professional lawyers whose members came to occupy the most important positions in both the administrative and judicial branches of government. Before the twelfth century, justice was administered by untrained jurors and based on local legal sources. In contrast, justice was now administered by professional judges appointed by a sovereign who could apply Roman law if local sources (either customary or statutory) were deficient. Through the activities of university-trained judges and jurists, the Roman law expounded by the Glossators and the Commentators entered the legal life of Continental Europe. It formed the basis of a common body of law, a common legal language and a common legal science—a development known as the ‘Reception’ of Roman law.Like the Latin language and the universal Church, the received Roman law served as an important universalising factor in the West at a time when there were no centralised states and no unified legal systems but a multitude of overlapping and often competing jurisdictions and sources of law (local customs and statutes, feudal, imperial and ecclesiastical law). However, the course of the reception was complex and characterised by a lack of uniformity. This derived from the fact that the way in which Roman law was received in different parts of Europe was affected to a great extent by local conditions, and the actual degree of Roman law infiltration varied from region to region. In areas of Southern Europe that had incorporated Roman law as part of the applicable customary law, the process of the reception may be described as a resurgence, refinement and enlargement of Roman law.
This occurred, for example, in Italy where the influence of Roman law had remained strong and in Southern France where the customary law that applied was already heavily Romanised. In Northern Europe, on the other hand, very little of Roman law had survived and the process of the reception was prolonged with a much more sweeping impact in some regions at its closing stages. The common law (ius commune) of Europe that gradually emerged towards the close of the Middle Ages was the result of a fusion between the Roman law of Justinian (as elaborated by medieval scholars), the canon law of the Church and Germanic customary law. The dominant element in this mixture was Roman law, although Roman law itself experienced considerable change under the influence of local custom and the statutory and canon law.The universal ius commune was juxtaposed with the ius proprium, the local laws of the diverse medieval city-states and other political communities. Local law sometimes assumed the form of statute or, especially in earlier times, grew out of custom.[740] But the universal and local laws were not necessarily antithetical; they were complementary and each interacted with and influenced the other. Statutory enactments born out of the need to address situations not provided for by the ius commune were often formulated and interpreted according to the concepts developed by scholars of the ius commune. The scholars, in turn, with their concern for concrete problems of social and commercial life and the need to deal with the law as it actually existed, took the local law into consideration. In their roles as judges, lawyers and officials, jurists trained in Roman law at Bologna and other law schools regarded local law as an exception to the ius commune, and therefore as something requiring restrictive interpretation. Furthermore, they tended to interpret local law based on concepts and terminology derived from Roman law, thereby bringing it into line or harmonizing it with the ius commune.51
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