Date: Friday 12th- Saturday 13th December 2008

Venue: Raeburn Room, Old College 

Legal reasoning in the Civil-law systems has its origins in the regulae or general principles distilled by medieval jurists from the texts of the sixth-century compilation of Roman law produced by authority of the eastern Roman emperor Justinian. It was the development of these principles that permitted creation of a medieval common law. In the centuries between the start of systematic teaching of the Digest and Codex and the work of Bartolus and Baldus, medieval jurists systematised the casuistic Roman material into a system of principles. Little research has been done on the methods employed by medieval jurists to transform the existing branches of Roman, customary, and feudal law into the ius commune. This conference will be concerned with the mechanics of this method of legal thought. It will investigate the manner in which legal doctrine developed in the high Middle Ages between the time of the rediscovery of the Digest in eleventh-century Italy and the rise of the ius commune as presented in the works of fourteenth-century Italian jurists such as Bartolus de Saxoferrato and his pupil Baldus de Ubaldis. It will do so by examining in detail their methods of argumentation and analysis. It will thereby recount the intellectual history of the development of the ius commune as the jurists took the casuistic Roman texts and distilled them into principles of law. It will not be concerned with broad surveys of areas of law, nor will it reduce the mechanics of legal reasoning to abstract theories.

The focus of this conference will be on private law, since much work has been done in other disciplines on the relationship between political theory and public law in medieval Europe. It will consist of a number of sessions organised around the traditional classifications of private law, e.g. family law, property law, contract law. Each area of law will be assigned to one or more specific speakers who will present a paper on a specific topic within the larger area of private law to demonstrate the manner in which medieval jurists contributed to the formation of the ius commune. They will not attempt a survey of the area, but in a detailed study will examine the development of juristic reasoning. Although the use of traditional classifications of private law in this conference may seem anachronistic, since much of medieval legal scholarship of the period was based on a text by text analysis of Roman legal scholarship rather than a coherent commentary on a specific area of law, it is hoped that the arrangement of sessions according to this structure might provide interesting insights into medieval legal scholarship and the origin of western legal thought.