Knowledge of law as knowledge of facts. The Roman experience

Clifford Ando, William Peyton Sullivan (eds). The Discovery of the Fact., University of Michigan Press; Law and Society in the Ancient World, 2020

An attempt at historical jurisprudence, the essay looks at the modern conception of "facts", associated with the Scientific revolution of the Seventeenth century, as a sequence in a broader archeological scenario, which encompasses both the medieval rediscovery of the inquisitorial procedure associated with Roman law, and the Legal Realist's call, at the outset of Twentieth century jurisprudence, to treat "law as fact". L’article rapporte l’analyse du concept moderne de fait, lié à la révolution scientifique du XVIIe siècle, à l’histoire longue de sa signification juridique, depuis la redécouverte médiévale des procédures d’enquête tirées du droit romain, jusqu’à l’essor du réalisme juridique au XXe siècle, invitant à considérer le droit comme un fait.

egal Science Series: themes and crisis E-BOOK 2 Legal System and Crisis

The article intends to advocate the standpoint that there is a practical reason for speculative thought and theoretical production in Philosophy of Law, which is not restricted to apprehension, description of reality and questioning of the state of the art. Considering all the advances of legal science to the present day, it is possible to say that this area of the human knowledge impact and contribute to the improvement of the state's adjudication activity, especially through the judicial constraint, which is materialized by the publicity and debate of errors and nonconformities of judicial decisions.

Classical Philology 109, 2014

This article argues that recent work in the field of Roman legal history has reached a critical mass, necessitating a re-thinking of traditional methods and assumptions. Part I reviews historiographical trends in the study of Roman legal history in two decades. Part II raises the question of what should count as a “legal” source and why, arguing that a much larger segment of the ancient world than scholars have traditionally thought participated in the creation of such rules. Part III discusses the value of the popular legal commentary, and suggests one possible new strategy for writing Roman legal history.

Dresch, P. and Scheele, J., Legalism. Rules and Categories (Oxford University Press, 2015), 2015

Legalism is at least as much about institutionalized cultures of argument, as it is about ‘rule following’. Developing the idea of 'Legalism after Anthropology' as a framework, the essay first explores the conceptual make-up of legalism itself, through an analysis of the nineteenth-century German legal theorist Rudolph von Jhering’s attack on Begriffsjurisprudenz (the ‘jurisprudence of concepts’) - before turning to the place of legal rules and concepts within (the later) Jhering’s own sociological jurisprudence. The following section, ‘Ethnography and The Concept of Law’, analyses the temporality, particularity, and constructed-ness of how ‘we’ see legal rules and concepts, taking H.L.A Hart’s analytical jurisprudence as our focus. The final two sections: 'Law Comes to Life in Institutions' and 'Legalism and Forensic Rhetoric: Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria' both concentrate on the technicalities of law in a broader sense. How, exactly, do legal rules and concepts ‘come to life' within institutionalized contexts and traditions? Rather than focusing on legal rules, concepts, and categories primarily in relation to doctrinal legal systems, we need to think more about the ethnology of legal rhetoric: about the roles that legal rules concepts, and categories play within different cultures of legal reasoning and argument.

Russian Law Journal, 2018

The article describes, referring to characteristic examples, the use of term "legal facts." Referring to a study of the Brazilian scholar Thiago Reis, the article explains why, in the beginning of Savigny's career the term "legal facts" had importance as a manner to summarize the hitherto separated forms of possession, and how the term continued to be central to Savigny's thinking, now turning into a central point of reference for legal science which was thought as being independent from philosophy and religion. Reis' study furthermore allows to describe how the term was used thereafter in Germany, namely mostly to defend the achievements of legal science against new approaches and losing sophistication. When, using presentations made at a seminar that was held in 2015 in Almaty, the article further describes the use of the term "legal facts," it argues that the higher reliance on the term throughout the CIS as compared to Germany may be linked to the lesser degree of detail knowledge about the historical contexts in which the term has been used, but also the lower degree of certainty about the benefit of the rules in the context of which the term "legal facts" is used. In other words, the same ambiguity typical for the use of the term in Germany exists throughout the CIS, and the term seems to lead to the expectation that there is an objective rule for the issue to be dealt with, it being unclear where the basis for such rule is.

Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues , 2023

This study shall present the consequences of the paradigm shift in thinking about law that took place in Ancient Rome (primarily, but not exclusively, in the early republic). It will present what distinguished the Roman concept of law from the concept of law present in other ancient laws, and what is still a living heritage of Roman thought, even if we do not realize it on a daily basis. Roman law will be compared with other laws of the European cultural circle, and therefore, apart from ancient Greece, the so-called Eastern despotias and the state (states) of the Jews. However, it is more about ideas than specific solutions. Therefore, in the comparative material will be also included the Muslim law, although it was created after the promulgation of the Justinian Code, considered the final stage in the formation of ancient Roman law. The Muslim law is however-in a sense-an heir of Middle Eastern legislation and expresses an alternative to Roman way of thinking about law. The aim is to show not only what distinguishes Roman law from the laws that precede it or its contemporaries, but what distinguishes Roman law from other possible ways of looking at laws in general. As a research hypothesis is presented the statement that the fundamental for the development of European legal culture were not so much specific Roman normative solutions, but a change in the paradigm of thinking about law: its secularization, understood as a break with divine origin or the sanctioning of law, and its professionalization, understood as the development of a specific category professional people dealing with the analysis and interpretation of law. At the end it is presented an open question why the secularization of the law happened only in Rome and why it ever happened there although in all other analyzed legal systems the connection between law and religion was never surpassed which this did not prevent the formation of a precise and sublime law, as was the case of the Islamic world.

Iustum Aequum Salutare XVI. 2020. 1. • 53–64, 2020

This is the published version of the speech delivered on the occasion of the awarding of the honorific title of ‘Distinguished Scholar of Natural Law’ in Pázmany Péter Catholic University, Budapest, May 31st, 2019. It provides some insights on the developments of my studies in the field of philosophy of law and legal logic. In the first three sections I stress the crucial role played by some Italian authors very critical of Kelsen’s normativism, as well as the philosophy and logic conceived by St. Augustine of Hippo and Francis Petrarch (my first two objects of research). In these sections I focus mainly on the relationship between rhetoric and truth. In the 5th section I discuss the origins of modern thought as far as they would be rooted in Neoplatonic philosophy. In the last three sections I extend my gaze to contemporary legal argumentative theories and to the dramatic loss of the sense of reality which characterizes many accounts on judicial logic.

This article presents evolution and correlation of basic legal notions. Polysemy of the notion of justice (ius) is shown, including its concurrence with the notion of law (lex). Down to the Modern Age the notion ius was an expression of justness. As a freedom, and in addition a primary one with respect to law, ius is understood only starting from the 17th century. The start of differentiation of justice (law) and morals was made as early as in Aristotle’s writings. A minimum of morality becomes stable with secular law (jus) already in medieval philosophy.