The Vital Connection between Present and Past
Nineteenth-century German legal scholarship was dominated by the Historical School. Its founding father, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, had outlined the programme of a 'historical legal scholarship' (geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft).[23] Of course, Savigny was also interested in legal history as such; the Geschichte des romischen Rechts im Mittelalter (I listory of Roman Law in the Middle Ages)[24] in six volumes, his main work as a legal historian, essentially created the modern discipline of legal history—'previously there had only been legal antiquities'.[25] [26] However, the central concern of his programmatic writings, as well as of his celebrated System des heutigen romischen Rechts (System of Contemporary Roman Law), was legal scholarship rather than legal history. But it was to be an 'organically progressive'4? legal scholarship, aware always of the 'vital connection'[27] between present and past. The main task of the modern private lawyer thus consisted in the 'intellectual penetration, adaptation and rejuvenation of the legal material as it has come down to us'.[28]' Since there is no 'completely separate and independent human existence... every age creates its own legal world, not for itself and arbitrarily, but in indissoluble community with the entire past'.[29] This was a fascinating vision[30] which was to prove extraordinarily influential and significantly affected the legal development far beyond the boundaries of Germany.[31] Soon, however, a number of problems became apparent which were partly inherent in Savigny's programme itself, or associated with some of its intellectual presuppositions, but which also partly arose from the way in which it was implemented by subsequent pandectist scholarship. 2.
More on the topic The Vital Connection between Present and Past:
- The Past according to International Law
- The connection to theories: interpretations of state transformation
- Types of people present
- Advocacy in present-day courts
- Separation Thesis and Connection Thesis
- THE PRESENT-DAY STUDY OF ROMAN LAW
- As put by P.B. Hutt, the history of progress in food and drug regulation over the past century is largely the history of the development of science, not the enactment of statutory provisions.1
- HI. LEGAL HISTORY AS A MEANS Of UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT STATE OF OUR LAW
- As we saw, the man who really ‘‘invented” the state was Thomas Hobbes. From his time up to the present, one of its most important functions - as of all previous forms of political organization - had been to wage war against others of its kind.
- The History of Political Thought in the African Political Present
- § 1 In a curriculum primarily devoted to the principles and practices of present-day American law it may be pertinent to question the inclusion of a course dealing with the Roman law.
- Contents
- A Synthesis of What has been 'Thought Apart'?
- This is a book about history: the ‘historical turn' in international law on the one hand, and the ‘international turn' in the history of political thought on the other.
- CONCLUSION
- LAW’S FLIRTATION WITH LITERATURE: ONE DISCIPLINE OR TWO?
- 1.3 HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE POLITICS OF POWER
- Chapter 1 Sources and methods