Early “Italian” Scholars of Ius Gentium

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-47
Author(s):  
Claudia Storti
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Shared Set ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ius Gentium

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries several issues led jurists to rethink the international legal order established in the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages. The first was the need to update the list of the law of nations legitimate subjects after the birth of the commune that had not been accounted for in Roman-law sources. The second was to recreate a superior and universally shared set of ‘public’ law rules for international relations to counteract the tendency of communal and monarchical governments to consider the law inter gentes as a form of internal law. In order to address this issue Bartolus of Sassoferrato adapted the Roman category of ius gentium to the features of the medieval geopolitical context. Other topics focused on defining the enemy, freedom of peoples, and treaties among unequal subjects, while the theory of ius gentium of Alberico Gentili was fully rooted in the medieval and early modern legal tradition.

The Law of the Nations as the Civil Law of the World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Volk
Keyword(s):  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Individual State ◽  
Global Ethics ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Law ◽  
Political Thinker

This chapter points out that Montesquieu argues in favour of a specific kind of political cosmopolitanism. For him, the law of nations appears as the civil law of the whole world. Essentially, it can be said that Montesquieu conceives of a law of nations that attempts to avert both the exploitation of other communities and also slavery. At the same time, however, he is not concerned with equating the law of nations with global ethics, or with establishing morally substantial yet politically ineffective obligatory requirements. Montesquieu tries to remain a political thinker who assumes the reality of individual state interests, but who wishes to integrate these in an international legal order that represents more than the consensus between states.

scholarly journals Medieval Canon Lawyers and European Legal Tradition. A Brief Overview

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-187
Author(s):  
Tomasz Giaro
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Public Institution ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
Medieval Universities

The Roman Church was a leading public institution of the Middle Ages and its law, canon law, belonged to most powerful factors of European legal history. Today’s lawyers have hardly any awareness of the canonist origins of several current legal institutions. Together with Roman law, canon law constituted the system of “both laws” (utrumque ius) which were the only laws acknowledged as “learned” and, consequently, taught at medieval universities. The dualism of secular (imperium) and spiritual power (sacerdotium), symbolized by so-called two swords doctrine, conferred to the Western legal tradition its balance and stability. We analyze the most important institutional achievements of the medieval canon lawyers: acquisitive prescription, the Roman-canonical procedure, the theory of just war, marriage and family law, freedom of contract, the inheritance under will, juristic personality, some institutions of constitutional law, in particular those based on the concept of representation, and finally commercial law. Last not least, the applicability of canon law defined the territorial extension of medieval and early modern Christian civilization which exceeded by far the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, where Roman law was effective as the law of the ruler. Hence, the first scholar to associate Roman law with (continental) Europe as a relatively homogeneous legal area, Paul Koschaker, committed in his monograph Europa und das römische Recht, published in 1947, the error of taking a part for the whole. In fact, Western legal tradition was based, in its entirety, not on Roman, but rather on canon law; embracing the common law of England, it represented – to cite Harold Joseph Berman – the first great “transnational legal culture”. At the end, some structural features of canon law are discussed, such as the frequent use of soft-law instruments and the respect for tradition, clearly visible in the approach to the problem of codification.

The Law of War and its Many Distinctions

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-250
Author(s):  
George P. Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Rome Statute ◽  
General Structure ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Law Of War ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Police Action ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Mind

This chapter focuses on the law of war and its many distinctions. The supreme distinction in this book is between lawful and unlawful. However, in the law of war, the distinctions multiply beyond control. Whether troops fighting abroad constitutes war is itself a disputed question; there has been a tendency in recent years to use “armed conflict” or “police action.” For the purposes of analyzing the Rome Statute and, in particular, Article 8 on war crimes, one has to assume an international perspective. Most countries in the international legal order are not democracies, and the internal allocation of power is not relevant to whether they violate Article 8. The complexity of Article 8 challenges the mind, with at least 50 distinct offenses. The chapter then elaborates on the perspectives necessary to grasp the general structure of war crimes in the international legal order.

The leges municipales as a Means of Legal and Social Romanization of the Provinces of the Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
pp. 315-331
Author(s):  
Werner Eck
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Southern Spain ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Legal Regulations ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
The West ◽  
The Law

Sections of the leges municipales from at least forty different cities in Southern Spain have survived to us. These laws, understood as a powerful instrument by which Roman legal regulations were introduced into the provinces, are usually connected with Baetica. As a result it is too easy to overlook the fact that corresponding leges were issued wherever Roman or Latin cities were founded, and continued to be issued long after the Flavian era, the time to which most of the surviving fragments date. Documentary evidence has now made clear that leges municipales are a general phenomenon which continued to play a role in the second and third centuries CE. Fragments of city laws are known not only in the province of Alpes Maritimae, but also in Noricum (Lauriacum), Moesia superior (Ratiaria), and in Troesmis (Moesia inferior). The law for Troesmis is especially important because, in contrast to the laws from Baetica, it was issued for a Roman and not a Latin municipium. This demonstrates that specific Roman legal regulations, which were issued in Augustan times exclusively for Roman citizens, were still of relevance in the second century and also must have been used in the province of Moesia inferior. This material indicates that people had to obey Roman legal regulations more or less everywhere in nearly all provinces of the West. The leges municipales were thus one of the decisive means by which Roman law spread in the provinces—more so than has previously been realized—and could even be the basis for daily life.

11. Roman Law and the European Ius Commune

2020 ◽  
pp. 359-394
Author(s):  
Paul J. du Plessis
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Conceptual Basis ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Ius Commune ◽  
The World ◽  
Common Framework ◽  
Formed Part

The term European ius commune (in its historical sense) signifies that, from the fourteenth to the start of the sixteenth centuries, most of Europe shared a common legal tradition. Many local and regional variations on the law existed, but the terminology, concepts, and structure provided by elements of Roman law provided a common framework. This chapter traces how Justinian’s codification came to influence the modern world. The influence of Roman law in the modern world is immense: it constitutes the historical and conceptual basis of many legal systems throughout the world. Its impact has not been confined to those countries in Western Europe that historically formed part of the Roman Empire. Wherever Europeans went, they normally took their law (usually based to some extent on the principles of Roman law) with them.

Roman Law as Part of Ancient Civilization: Reflections on Leopold Wenger's Last Work

Traditio ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 381-394
Author(s):  
Hans Julius Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Mediterranean Area ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Ancient Civilization ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

The monumental volume with which we are dealing is the legacy left to his science by a man who will always be counted among the most distinguished and most influential scholars of Roman law and ancient legal history in the first half of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he first began to teach Roman law at the University of Graz, Leopold Wenger had conceived a plan of writing a history of the whole legal order of the Romans that would comprise the total of public, procedural, and private institutions in one great unit. He proposed to see his unit in the light of its general political and cultural setting and to interpret it as bringing to its climax and final achievement, under Justinian, the evolution of law and legal thought of all antiquity; antiquity itself he understood as one single historical process interrelating the multitude of peoples and civilizations of the Mediterranean area that grew and declined, succeeded and influenced each other, until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire and were thus enabled to transmit their common heritage to later centuries. Understandably enough, this gigantic project involved more than one scholar could accomplish in one lifetime. Wenger was not able to carry it out. He did, however, succeed in completing, in this detailed description and discussion of the sources, the first instalment, and happily lived to see its publication shortly before his death on September 21, 1953, at the age of seventy-nine.

The Development of International Law Since the War

1928 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manley O. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Law ◽  
Made In

We are now approaching the end of the first decade following the World War. Perhaps we are sufficiently removed from the heat and passion of that struggle to attempt to gauge the progress which the world has made in the development of international law since it was ended. Ten years is a brief period in any field of history; but before this decade was begun, most of us felt that it was going to see great things accomplished toward broadening and strengthening and extending the law by which the relations of states are governed. The war brought a challenge to our international legal order which could hardly have failed to create for our generation an opportunity to leave an impression on international law, such as has been left by no other generation in the three hundred years since the time of Grotius. As the decade is ending, and as our generation begins to find its energies so absorbed in other tasks, an appraisal of the progress we have achieved may enable us to judge the use we have made of our opportunity and the extent to which it still exists.

'Verfallpfand' in early classical Roman Law: real security in the archive of the Sulpicii

2011 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
H.L.E. Verhagen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
First Century ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Commercial Lenders ◽  
The Law ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe writing tablets discovered in 1959 near Pompeii (Tabulae Pompeianae Sulpiciorum or Tabulae Pompeianae Novae) provide a unique and extremely valuable insight into the 'law in action' in the Roman Empire of the first century AD. In particular, these tablets allow us to assess the functioning of the law of secured finance, as it was applied by the Sulpicii family and other commercial lenders in the seaport town of Puteoli (Pozzuoli). The focus of this article is on the enforcement of a right of pledge in case of default by the debtor. In particular, it discusses whether the creditor then acquired ownership of the pledged property or whether he was only entitled to suspend his obligation to return the pledged property to the debtor. It is argued that the most likely interpretation of the writing tablets is that the creditor acquired ownership when the debtor defaulted and that this enabled him to sell the property at auction or otherwise.

The Influence of the Law of Nature Upon International Law in the United States

1909 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse S. Reeves
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Traditional System ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Scholastic Philosophy

The political philosophers of the eighteenth century might have been surprised if told that their favorite doctrine of natural rights was the intellectual successor of certain theories of the Roman law and of the scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Yet the “ state of nature,” which filled so large a place in the discussion of natural rights, has been called “ an exaggerated perversion of what, in traditional system, was quite a subordinant point” From Locke to Hooker, and back through the scholastic philosophy, the germ of natural rights has been traced to the jus naturœ and the jus gentium of the Roman law. Grotius and his successors preserved the tradition in another and more direct line. The continuity of Grotius with the doctrine of the Roman law was complete. “ The law of nature,” said Holland, “ is the foundation, or rather the scaffolding, upon which the modern science of International Law was built up by Gentilis and Grotius. The change in the meaning of jus gentium made by Grotius and his successors, and the influence which the jus naturœ had in forming the new conception of the law of nations can only be referred to here.

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