This book is a fundamental reassessment of the nature and impact of legal humanism on the development of law in Europe. It brings together the foremost international experts in related fields such as legal and intellectual history to debate central issues surrounding this movement.

This book is a fundamental reassessment of the nature and impact of legal humanism on the development of law in Europe. It brings together the foremost international experts in related fields such as legal and intellectual history to debate central issues

This text is a fundamental reassessment of the nature and impact of legal humanism on the development of law in Europe. It brings together the foremost international experts in related fields such as legal and intellectual history to debate central issues surrounding this movement.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the European Research Council. Roman law is widely considered to be the foundation of European legal culture and an inherent source of unity within European law. Roman Law and the Idea of Europe explores the emergence of this idea of Roman law as an idealized shared heritage, tracing its origins among exiled German scholars in Britain during the Nazi regime. The book follows the spread and influence of these ideas in Europe after the war as part of the larger enthusiasm for European unity. It argues that the rise of the importance of Roman law was a reaction against the crisis of jurisprudence in the face of Nazi ideas of racial and ultranationalistic law, leading to the establishment of the idea of Europe founded on shared legal principles. With contributions from leading academics in the field as well as established younger scholars, this volume will be of immense interests to anyone studying intellectual history, legal history, political history and Roman law in the context of Europe.

Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature argues that, ironically, custom was a supremely generative literary force for a range of Renaissance writers. Custom took on so much power because of its virtual synonymity with English common law, the increasingly dominant legal system that was also foundational to England's constitutionalist politics. The strange temporality assigned to legal custom, that is, its purported existence since 'time immemorial', furnished it with a unique and paradoxical capacity—to make new and foreign forms familiar. This volume shows that during a time when novelty was suspect, even insurrectionary, appeals to the widespread understanding of custom as a legal concept justified a startling array of fictive experiments. This is the first book to reveal fully the relationship between Renaissance literature and legal custom. It shows how writers were able to reimagine moments of historical and cultural rupture as continuity by appealing to the powerful belief that English legal custom persisted in the face of conquests by foreign powers. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature thus challenges scholarly narratives in which Renaissance art breaks with a past it looks back upon longingly and instead argues that the period viewed its literature as imbued with the aura of the past. In this way, through experiments in rhetoric and form, literature unfolds the processes whereby custom gains its formidable and flexible political power. Custom, a key concept of legal and constitutionalist thought, shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed custom into an evocative mythopoetic.

Codes of Jewish law may look similar, but they represent very different ways of thinking about the law.

In Learning Law and Travelling Europe, Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen offers an exciting account of the study journeys of Swedish lawyers in the early modern period. Based on archival sources and biographical information, the study delves into the backgrounds of the law students, their travels through Europe, and their future careers. In seventeenth-century Sweden, the state-building process was at its height, and trained officials were desperately needed for the administration and judiciary. The book shows convincingly that the studies abroad of future lawyers were intimately linked to this process, whereas in the eighteenth century, study journeys became less important. By examining the development of the Swedish early modern legal profession, the book also represents an important contribution to comparative legal history.

Showcases a novel method for approaching private international law combining theoretical insight, textual analysis and historical context.

This book explores how the fathers of humanist jurisprudence contributed to the emergence of ius gentium as the common law not simply of Europe, but of all mankind, in the early sixteenth century.

This is a book on “equity in the civil law tradition” from the double perspective of legal history and comparative law. It is intended not only for civil lawyers who want to better understand the role and history of equity in their own legal tradition, but also – and perhaps more saliently – for common lawyers who are curious about why the history of equity has unfolded so differently on the continent of Europe and in Latin America. The author begins with the investigation of the philosophical foundations of the Western notion of equity in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle and of how their ideas affected the works of the great Attic orators (chapter 2). He then addresses the way in which Roman law turned this notion into a legal concept of considerable practical importance (chapter 3) and how it survived the fall of Rome and was later elaborated in the Middle Ages by civilists and canonists (chapter 4). Subsequently, the author analyses how the notion of equity was dealt with in the Modern Era by legal humanists, Protestant and Catholic theologians, scholars of the usus modernus pandectarum and of Roman-Dutch law, and then by legal rationalism and the philosophers of the Enlightenment (chapter 5). He then deals with the history of equity on the continent since the fragmentation of the ius commune and the codifications of the nineteenth century and with its reception in Latin America (chapter 6). Finally, the author offers some closing remarks on the fundamental equivocalness (or relativity, as some scholars put it) of the notion of equity in the civil law tradition today (conclusion).