The thread that runs through it

Peter Stein's article, "Justinian's Compilation: Classical Legacy and Legal Source, was a very enjoyable and engaging read. Informationally rich and well written, I found myself eagerly reading about the texts that comprise Justinian's master compilation.

As I read, it seemed I kept following a thread running through the paragraphs. A thread of separation, yet also one of unification. I picked up this thread on page 7. After the glossators of the twelfth century there came the commentators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Chief among the commentators, who set their task as one of extracting law from the morass the glossators sought to illuminate, was Bartolus. Just as Bartolus is boiling down Justinian's concepts and generalizing the texts to make them easier to comprehend I pick up the first skein of my thread.

Stein brings this to my attention with an illustration on the conflict of law. As Stein says,"Bartolus generalizes from these texts and infers from them that the duties imposed by a contract are determined by the law of the place (italics, mine) where the contract was made, but failure to comply with the terms of a contract is to be judged by the law of the place where it should have been performed. So, we have a larger concept of law as standardized for all peoples with the empire, but that law is subject to the law of the place where the contract was made, the activity to be performed, and the conflict occurred.

After the commentators, the humanists arrived on the scene. Here too, a group of scholars part the curtain that veils the text of the law and then bring it into the open for all to see. Stein quotes Zasii Epistolae,II as describing the humanists as tearing away the commentary "like a giant creeper," and I envision Kudzu here, in order to make clear the path to the text itself. As a result, by examining the texts and discovering inaccuracies that perpetuated over time, the humanists showed that reading legal texts was akin to extracting the rule that made sense, rather than accepting the text as gospel.

As this thread weaves through the text of Stein's article it brings us further along the development of humanistic thought and into their attempt to balance the world of Justinian with that of the France of their day. In their scholarly struggles the humanists found that this was a concept they could not reconcile. In finding that the law of Justinian's day was not applicable to that of their own time, the humanists found their conflict of place. The local, if you will, once again supersedes the law of empire.

Finally we come to the end of our thread with Donellus's commentaries on the Civil Law. Taking threads from both the commentators and the humanists, Donellus's tack was to break down the larger whole into the parts, moving from a macro to a micro approach. In this too, we seem to follow the thread of moving from Roman to local, or from large and all encompassing to small and specific.

When viewing the article from this perspective it appears that each group, the glossators, the commentators, the humanists, each took an approach to a major document and brought insight that could be shared and passed to the next generation of scholars. It's a fascinating look at a text from the ancient world as it travels through the centuries. As Stein concludes, in order for Roman Law to survive as a field of study in law schools today it must not be presented in a vacuum but integrated into the society of its day. We are in the process of doing just that at WVU. We're bringing in histories of West Virginia, a state with a tumultuous past, in order to set the context for the study of state law. It's a good idea.