Judging and Settling disputes in the Middle Ages

2022

The instabilities that have characterized the international economic settings of the last decades and the effort to synchronize the judiciary systems across continents, to allow for a smoother exchange pattern in spite of nationalistic tendencies, invite us to reflect more on the development of the commercial judiciary systems of the past. Legal and institutional resources are today, as were then, used by actors to manage commercial conflicts, in order to achieve better terms – or enforce – contracts and business relationships. The panel aims at investigating the judiciary Western European context in the Late Medieval period (13th-16thcenturies), with a focus on new approaches, methods, and sources. Being Europe an intersection of local customs and ius comune, characterized by diverse economic policies and political framework with dozens of competing jurisdictions, economic and financial activities, and lifestyle, it is the perfect case study to analyze the way commercial conflicts were managed. The papers will focus on the legal culture, the arguments, and the strategies deployed by the actors (merchants, craftsmen, ordinary people) in order to defend their reasons in court and get out of (but not necessarily resolving) a conflict: Which evidence were deemed admissible, or useful, and what knowledge of written norms did the actors have? Did trust and good behavior play an important role in a moral economy? Were actors able to deploy different strategies, using, for example, other courts or institutions (royal court, nations, etc.), extrajudicial negotiation, or political pressure (retaliation, economic diplomacy, etc.)?

The American Historical Review, 1988

Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 90 (1-2) 2022, p. 270-275

The product of more than thirty years of research, this volume is primarily intended as an anthology of ius commune texts in English translation designed to support undergraduate teaching and to 'introduce an audience of nonspecialists to outstanding voices of medieval Italian jurisprudence' (p. 39). However, while pointing to one of the authors' undoubted achievements, the latter affirmation appears to be something of an understatement. Preceded by a large number of studies, editions and translations (such as Kirshner's translation of Bartolus of Sassoferrato's De tyranno and the edition and translation of Bartolus' De insigniis et armis produced by Kirshner and Cavallar with Susanne Degenring) 1 , this massive work actually represents a summa of the methodology developed by the two scholars in their decades-long research on the history of the late medieval ius commune. After a general Introduction (p. 3-43), the volume is divided into six parts, each devoted to a general topic: 'Professors and Students' (p. 45-174), 'Legal Profession' (p. 175-252), 'Civil and Criminal Procedure' (p. 253-396), 'Crime' (p. 397-462), 'Personal and Civic Status' (p. 463-577) and 'Family Matters' (p. 579-826). These are followed by a Glossary of Latin terms (with references to the chapters in which each term appears) and two Appendices: the first introduces the Corpora iuris civilis and canonici and the medieval system of legal citation, and the second lists 90 selected jurists, including the date of their death. An index of names and places is also provided. The six parts encompass a total of 45 chapters dealing with specific themes. Each chapter opens with a brief but informative introduction that gives the necessary background for the subsequent translation(s). In the space of a few pages, the authors manage to clarify technical aspects in plain language and to illustrate the interplay of ius commune doctrines and the socio-political world in which they operated by referring to a wide range of local statutes 2. Occasionally these introductions turn into dazzling frescos illustrating the

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86137106808?pwd=TjJMZHF3U2pCWk9pZlYwenVxWXpBUT09 No registration is required. This conference is part of the post-doctoral research project Z6-3223 (B) 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS), and the research programme P6-0435 (A) 'Practices of Conflict Resolution Between Customary and Statutory Law in the Area of Today’s Slovenia and Its Neighbouring Lands', co-funded by ARIS.

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.

Parergon, 2009

«Al Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean», 29 (2017) Issue 2, "Justice in Early Medieval Northern Iberia" pp. 133-150, 2017

The settlement of justice has been seen in recent decades as a powerful tool of governance in the Early Middle Ages. This paper aims to study justice in the county of Castile between the tenth and eleventh centuries in order to observe different strategies of authority and consensus. These strategies acted in different political contexts and on different scales, and this paper focuses on the role played by counts, ecclesiastical aristocracies and rural societies in the construction of a political system at a time of continuous negotiation.

In this article historiography on early modern legal practice is reviewed regarding the relative accessibility of law courts in early modern Europe. References on England and France and to a lesser extent on the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries are used to assess what is known about the extent to which lower social groups could and did use judicial infrastructure to settle disputes and whether and how this changed during the early modern period. To date, historiography does not allow for clear-cut answers to such questions. However, it does offer an opening for such inquiry, comprising elements that lead to a pessimistic as well as a more optimistic assessment. The possible impact of juridical fragmentation, the organisation of law courts and of juridification is considered. The article ends with suggestions for new research that aims for a socially and chronologically differentiated analysis of the uses ordinary people made of justice to negotiate their social-economic relations and issues.