The Creation of Legal Principle

2014

In this article the concept "legal consciousness" investigates in connection with the concepts of the "mentality", "identity" and «culture". The main problem is to retrace the basis of the medieval legal consciousness formation, to indicate the components forming its structure. The juridical consciousness, language, sign system of the Middle Ages, are the unified system reflecting integrity of a society. However borders with necessity exist and define society existence. The border represents a condition for existence of the society and also the concrete individual. The law of medieval Europe is symbolical and ritual. The Roman law and the Christian religion are the most important components of medieval legal consciousness and mentality in Europe in the context of this article.

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.

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.

Global jurist, 2008

The analysis in this writing starts with an investigation on the position of customary law in the system of legal sources, both in the Justinean legal system and in the Argentinean one. The results of this analysis are used as a basis for further, wider considerations on the structure of the legal system in the civil law tradition; and, as well, on the possibility of finding today, in Latin America, an epiphany of the system of ius commune which has been in force in the late Roman Empire, medieval and early modern continental Europe. A survey is made of how legal doctrines attempted, through the centuries, to interpret the presence in the Justinean corpus of the different fragments related to the consuetudo (customary law) and to its relation with the lex (statutory law), mostly D.I,3,32 e C.8,52, in order to make sense of what has seemed for centuries to be an evident antinomy within the Justinean Corpus Iuris. A subsequent similar investigation is then done for the Argentinean legal system of sources of law, which features peculiar elements allowing similar questions. Some conclusions will be drawn from these analyses and used to propose a different reconstruction of the legal system of Latin America (not just Argentina) in an ius commune perspective. This paper is meant to be a contribution to the research on the viability of a modern system of ius commune. Or, at least, to propose a different reading of civil law legal systems, based on the recognition of a legal model-if latent or recessive-based on ius commune, operating in a dialectic confrontation with the prevalent, modern civil law model accepted in the European legal science.

2019

This is the second volume of a series of six, published by Bloomsbury in 2019. The contributions included in this volume cast new light on the cultural significance of law in the Middle Ages. As it evolved from a combination of religious norms, local customs, secular legislations and Roman jurisprudence, medieval law defined a normative order that was more than the sum of its parts. It promoted new forms of individual and social representation. It fostered the political renewal that heralded the transition from feudalism to the early modern state and contributed to the diffusion of a common legal language with the emergence of the ius commune.

in: Empire and Legal Thought. Ideas and Institutions from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Edward Canavagh, Brill/Nijhoff [Studies in the History of International Law], Leiden/Boston, 2020

This chapter outlines a history of the concept of ius gentium. It is intended to serve as a contribution to the intellectual history of international law, from Late Antiquity to Early Modern Times. The historical role played by the concept in the framing of international law is not easy to evaluate, as the oldest traces of Roman ‘public international law’, in the sense of law regulating relations between polities, are actually found within ius fetiale. It is, in fact, difficult to arrive at a clear understanding of ius gentium in the history of Ancient and Medieval legal thought, due to a semantic stratification dating back to Roman Antiquity: on the one hand, a fundamental ambiguity exists in the relationship between ius naturale and ius gentium (as in Gaius’ definition, Dig. 1.1.9, possibly under Ciceronian influence) – on the other, the latter, first classified as a branch of the ius privatum (Ulpian, Dig. 1.1.1.4), was later understood as including public law institutes (Hermogenian, Dig. 1.1.5) and even institutes mainly relating to foreign relations (Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae V.6 = Decretum c. 9, d. 1). The simple juxtaposition of these definitions within Justinian’s compilation and Gratian’s Decretum raised several theoretical issues for Medieval jurists, and generated a significant scholarly debate. Firstly, following Dig. 1.1.4 and Dig. 1.1.5, glossators argued that ius naturale and ius gentium – not, as would be claimed by later jurists, Roman law as a whole – formed the ius commune. Secondly, commentaries on Dig. 1.1.5 analysed the various legal institutes listed within the passage, focusing particularly on dominium and obligations. Thirdly, both jurists and theologians elaborated extensively upon the connections between ius gentium and ius naturale: they first drew a distinction between ius naturale primaevum and secundarium, and then reformulated this distinction in such a way that ius gentium itself was split into ius gentium primaevum and secundarium. Many words were to be expended on this distinction until well into Early Modern Times, in the course of a discussion which recent scholarship has studied in depth. This chapter, however, will focus less on this doctrinal debate during the the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than on the transformation undergone by ius gentium as it developed into a ius inter gentes specifically regulating relations between political communities. Special attention will be paid to diplomatic theory, which has proven to be a particularly interesting field within which to fully evaluate the slow emergence of the state as the only legitimate subject of international law.

This paper, which (in shortened form) was originally delivered at a conference in Bologna in 2013 and in revised form as the SCS lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, attempts to present my own views as the development of Roman legal culture during the early Empire. The paper still needs some work, particularly as to "ius quo utimur," and the bibliography also needs updating. Comments are welcomed, in the meantime.

Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis / Revue d'Histoire du Droit / The Legal History Review, 2012

In this article I wish to show how history of legal doctrines can assist in a better understanding of the legal reasoning over a long historical period. First I will describe the nineteenth century discussion on the definition of law as a ‘science’, and some influences of the medieval idea of science on the modern definition. Then, I’ll try to delve deeper into a particular doctrinal problem of the Middle Ages: how to fit the feudal relationship between lord and vassal into the categories of Roman law. The scholastic interpretation of these categories is very original, to the point of framing a purely personal relationship among property rights. The effort made by medieval legal culture to frame the reality into the abstract concepts of law can be seen as the birth of legal dogmatics.