This chapter gives an overview of the state of the art in legal historical scholarship on the neoscholastic analysis of property, torts, and contracts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Neoscholastics, especially followers of the so-called ‘School of Salamanca’, have been credited with laying the foundations of a principled, systematic approach to the law of property and obligations. Concrete examples illustrating the wealth of the primary source material on these topics will be drawn mainly from Leonardus Lessius’s tractate De iustitia et iure, first published in Louvain in 1605. He is generally recognized to be one of the most important representatives of neoscholastic legal thought. Standing between the medieval ius commune and the Protestant natural law tradition, neoscholastics such as Lessius played a major role in shaping modern private law doctrines.
