The History of Law in Europe. An Introduction (original) (raw)
Comprehensive and accessible, this book offers a concise synthesis of the evolution of the law in Western Europe, from ancient Rome to the beginning of the twentieth century. It situates law in the wider framework of Europe’s political, economic, social and cultural developments. Offering a readily graspable and sound structure, chapters are organized according to the civil law systems and common law systems. Each chapter is built around the evolution of the four sources of the law: legal science, legislation, courts and customary law, set chronologically against the relevant historical context. Throughout this in-depth presentation of the key determinants in European legal history, Bart Wauters and Marco de Benito allow readers to understand how the law arose and evolved in Europe as a shared language, of which its different national laws are but dialectal expressions – with the unique exception, perhaps, of English common law, whose peculiarity is likewise due to accidents of history which are themselves explored. With its elegant comparative approach, this book will appeal to European Law students and scholars looking for a concise, yet academically sound, account of the history of law in Europe.
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Review of Tamar Herzog, A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia.
Journal on European History of Law, 2019
The creation of Europe under a unifying law has been one of the most important human achievements. This law set out a number of man-made rules, devised to ensure peaceful relations, with the purpose of holding the continent together, albeit not entirely successfully as the history of decades of internal political conflicts demonstrate. Nevertheless, the fragile malleability of this law has meant the endurance of the unity despite conflicts, and its evolution means that it influences what is known today as European law. In A Short History of European Law, Tamar Herzog beautifully and succinctly tells the story of European law in six parts, exploring its journey across different phases of history, from the ancient times to the twentieth century.
The beginnings of medieval and modern jurisprudence: The development of European legal thought
Dialog Campus Publisher
In this volume, I have tried to expand in four directions, starting from the field of thinned-out legal theory. In the introductory chapter, I outlined some of the basic features of the development of medieval and modern European law; in the following chapters - and this is the title of the volume - I analysed the main stages in the development of European jurisprudence over the last thousand years; finally, in the last two chapters, I attempted to summarise briefly the development of the main categories of private law dogmatics and criminal law dogmatics. The latter two openings may allow theorists of legal theory and of these two fields of law to develop common forums for discussion, thus reviving the discourses of legal philosophy/criminal law and legal philosophy/private law theory which have been extinct for many decades. It should be pointed out that this four-way opening has brought such a mass of literature into the analysis, less Hungarian than German, Anglo-American and French legal literature, that in this first round I have had to limit myself to a simple excerpt in a number of cases concerning new topics. This is particularly the case in the chapters on glossators and commentators, where I have based my writing mainly on the analyses of Hermann Lange and the Coing-Handbuch, and in the chapter on the development of private law doctrinal categories I have focused mainly on Hans Hattenhauer's monograph on this subject.
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