Medieval Legal Realism

Project IEC PRO2018-S05. Models del dret i la filosofia política catalanes: semàntica de les doctrines juridicopolítiques del pactisme en les seves diferents fases [Models of Catalan political philosophy and law: Semantics of pactmodel driven political and legal doctrines at their different stages].

2011

This paper constitutes a short introduction to Catalan political and legal thought. I have tried to summarize the essentials of a particular way to understand institutions, legal systems and political behavior which are historical in nature. Several researchers, historians, jurists, and political scientists are addressing the traditional subject of Catalan pactism with a renewed interest. This paper is conceived as a reflection on this trend. I distinguish between ‘Catalan legal mind’ and ‘the Legal Catalan Mind’ which started up at the beginning of the 16 th c., was consolidated during the 17 th , and eventually produced what is known as “political pactism” in the 19 th c. and 20 th c.

2016

This paper constitutes a short introduction to Catalan political and legal thought. I have tried to summarize the essentials of a particular way to understand institutions, legal systems and political behavior which are historical in nature. Several researchers, historians, jurists, and political scientists are addressing the traditional subject of Catalan pactism with a renewed interest. This paper is conceived as a reflection on this trend. I distinguish between 'Catalan legal mind' and 'the Legal Catalan Mind' which started up at the beginning of the 16 th c., was consolidated during the 17 th , and eventually produced what is known as "political pactism" in the 19 th c. and 20 th c.

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2017

This paper describes several aspects of a formal digital semantic model that expresses some issues presented by medieval charters. Surprisingly, perhaps, this model does not deal directly with a charter's text and is not mark-up based. Instead, it draws on the authors’ experience with the construction of three highly structured factoid-oriented prosopographical databases that drew heavily on charter sources, and that also did not explicitly contain a digital representation of the charter texts. The paper explains the way in which the structured data model thus derived differs from text-oriented approaches such as TEI/CEI work that has been done so far on charters. It presents a view on why this factoid-based model seems to capture more readily some of the complexity in the apparent meanings of the charters, and suggests that this is because it is also more likely to relate to a richer conception of the broader medieval world in which these charters were created than text-oriente...

In Jenny Benham, Matthew McHaffie and Helle Vogt (eds.), Law and Language in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 2018 (Medieval Law and Its Practice, vol. 25), ISBN: 978-90-04-37576-5, p. 128-164.

Formulas are seldom direct citations of legislation or other types of legal texts, but they represent a normative and stereotyped way of stating things. At the same time, they are an important feature of charters, which stem from specific transactions, disputes, etc. In charters recording judicial cases, formulas play an intermediate role between the ‘language of law’ (that of a body of normative texts) and the ‘language of justice’ (that of records describing and legitimizing judicial practice). This paper examines the formulaic structure of pre-1100 Portuguese dispute texts, including both judicial records and charters with indirect references to disputes. It starts with some considerations on the form of dispute records and its implications in terms of formulaic writing, then proceeds to a detailed analysis of formulas and their usage in different types of records, ending with some brief remarks on the language of formulas. An attempt is made to understand (i) how dispute texts were constructed in order to become authoritative records, and (ii) how these texts relate to the workings of judicial practice, which has shaped formulas as much as these have shaped judicial practice itself.

Spanish journal of legislative studies, 2019

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.

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.

Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 2021

The paper examines the origin of the pacta sunt servanda maxim. After investigating the doctrinal output of the late medieval canon law jurisprudence it claims that it was Antonius de Butrio ca. 1389-1408 who first used these very words to express the established canonical doctrine of actionability of all agreements. Additionally, the paper shows when summaries were added to the core text of the Decretals. It was an innovation of incunabula publishers from 1489 and it was only then (and definitely not in 1234) when the famous words pacta quantumcunque nuda servanda sunt were placed as summarium to c. Antigonus (X 1.35.1). These words were reiterated by the editors from the commentary of famous Nicolaus de Tudeschis and they served to disseminate the canonical doctrine of the binding force of all agreements.

Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2018

here 564). Moreover, when called to specify the horizon of Iberian authors that the editors specify when dealing with the Thomistic idea of law, their list splits scholars into two groups according to their "orthodox" Thomism (2). This approach, however, seems anachronistic when applied to sixteenth-century Scholasticism. These points, despite their importance, do not weaken what is a welcome addition to the field. The overarching rationale of this book is particularly promising. The concept of lex in Spanish Scholasticism has a wide field of different applications in the areas of political thought, ethics, psychology, natural philosophy, scripture, and moral theology. Indeed, the editors seem to base the coherence of the volume on the idea that the concept of law, as defined by "certain fundamental features common to all domains of reality," might be seen as a common theme between medieval and modern philosophy (2). The structure of the volume admittedly reflects this, offering a very learned introductory survey on the medieval heritage of the concept of lex by Matthias Kaufmann, and three sections that focus on how this concept has been dealt with by the Spanish Scholastics in the fields of political philosophy, ethics, and moral psychology. However, the book's thesis-that the overarching concept of law was based on the essential features of positive human law, a point shared by the School of Salamanca-may preclude a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of the concept of law. Indeed, Tobias Schaffner rightly points out in his contribution that the concept of law-as far as it concerns Suárez's thought, at