Protecting the Fatherland: Lawsuits and Political Debates in Jülich, Hesse-Cassel and Brittany (1642-1655) (original) (raw)

The History of Law in Europe. An Introduction

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.

History, Law, and Justice: Empirical Method and Conceptual Confusion in the History of Law

UC Irvine Law Review 5 (2015): 413–62, 2015

This Article draws on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Ulpian’s definition of law, and Aristotle’s definition of the polis in order to improve our understanding of the relationship between history, law, and justice. It makes three points. First, real progress can be made by taking one’s instruction from Wittgenstein’s lifelong attempt to banish meaninglessness from thought and speech. He has far more to offer than has been recognized to date. Second, historians of law deceive themselves if they believe that they can write the history of law without writing the history of justice at one and the same time. Law and justice are thoroughly intertwined. Their intertwinement constitutes their meaning. Treating one of them in isolation from the other impairs the meaning of both. Third, writing the history of law means making a commitment to a political community by settling disagreements with the dead. It furnishes a kind of knowledge that is essential for maintaining justice because it gives a meaning to “law,” “justice,” and “politics” without which law, justice, and politics fall to the judgment of the dead or that of arbitrary rulers. It does not consist of writing about justice, but of making judgments in writing about the history of law. It is neither to be confused with expressions of opinion nor with statements ofpure fact: not expressions ofopinion, because it requires statements offact; not statements of pure fact, because there are no facts to state without agreement in the judgments that make a political community.

The Common History of European Legal Scholarship

Erasmus Law Review, 2011

This paper traces the common history of European legal scholarship from its beginning in the late 12 th century to the development of national codifications which started some six centuries later. During this period, Roman law was of great importance in the universities, and Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis was the central text for legal studies. We will look at the different approaches to this body of text that legal scholarship has taken over the years. Still, Roman law did not have a complete monopoly: we will have a look as well at Canon law and Moral Theology, which also developed a system of legal norms, but on an entirely different basis. They paved the way for Natural law, which-in a critical dialogue with Roman law-paved the way for modern codifications.

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.