European Law: Past and Future: Unity and Diversity over Two Millennia

Author: R.C. van Caenegem
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: This book does not intend to provide a general overview of the legal history of Europe; it merely presents several topics that can attract my students' interest, and also aims to pique the interest of a broader public who believe that the future of European law is also of great significance to the world. Some of these topics are essentially historical—such as the origins of the 19th-century German Civil Code; some are comparative—such as the contrast between common law and civil law; while others address current issues—such as the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution (this is a prominent example of a legal scriptural issue). At the end, the future of European law has been widely studied, and the question of whether a truly general legal science is possible in a unified 21st-century Europe once raised takes us back to the days when the ius commune was the common science and language of legal scholars across the regions—from Aberdeen to Naples, from Kraków to Coimbra.