The Legal History Review最新文献

Summary

The development of normativity in international law: the use of historical discourse in Alberico Gentili’s De legationibus. – The aim of this article is to examine the sources used and the method employed by Alberico Gentili in his De legationibus, to elaborate a norm for the law of embassies. Although legal sources feature prominently in this treatise, the majority of them are derived from a variety of sources from Antiquity (historians, philosophers, rhetors, poets, etc.). Alberico Gentili mainly uses historical sources, and more specifically the exemplum, in his treatise. By mobilizing historical exempla alongside legal sources, the jurist created a rational normative system capable of responding to the diplomatic challenges of the sixteenth century brought about by constantly evolving practice.

Summary

This article seeks to contribute to the growing current of legal historical literature on early modern commercial law. It examines the topic of monopolies and their prohibition in the Codex of Justinian (C. 4,59,2). Its purpose is to explore one aspect of the renewed interest in the topic among lawyers and theologians in the early 16th century, when trading corporations and authorities worldly and ecclesial caused a proliferation of monopolies. The aspect in question is the source material from the legal and theological tradition that early modern authors had at their disposal. Through analysing the printed editions of medieval works from Roman and canon law and from theology, this contribution sketches an image of scattered attention and a strong focus on guilds until the very last years of the Middle Ages. Only after 1450 do the roots of the notions that would dominate later debates come to the fore, and near exclusively in the works of moral theologians such as Konrad Summenhart.

Summary

This article traces the doctrinal debate on the civil legal personality of foreign states occasioned by two famous legal cases during the closing decade of the nineteenth century: the protracted conflict between Greece and Romania following Evangelis Zappa’s bequest of immovable property located in Romania to the Greek state for the purpose of resurrecting the Olympic Games, and the contested will of the Marquise du Plessis-Bellière which named Pope Leo xiii as legatee of real estate located in France. As Ernst Rabel and others have thought, the debate confirmed the scholarly consensus that the recognition given to a foreign state according to the rules of public international law, implies recognition of its capacity in private law matters. The objective of this article is to reconstruct the considerations that led to this apparent consensus, thus helping to facilitate an assessment of the persuasiveness of those considerations.

Summary

In 1599, Dutch privateer Melchior van den Kerckhoven unlawfully captured the Venetian merchantman Ponte, which resulted in extensive legal proceedings before the Supreme Court of Holland, Zeeland and West-Friesland. The Ponte case soon became the centrepiece for discussions about vicarious liability of shipowners for unlawful acts of their shipmasters, and – more importantly – about limitation of this liability to (the value of) their ship and cargo. Within these discussions, a secondary role was reserved for the case arising from the capture of the French ship Levrette by a Dutch merchantman in 1610. Based on extensive archival research, the present article offers a detailed reconstruction of the facts and proceedings of the Ponte and the Levrette case, and sets out how these cases were employed by Roman-Dutch lawyers to give shape to limited liability of shipowners for unlawful acts of their shipmaster.

Summary

Creditor fructus percepit, On pledge with a pactum antichreticum. – May the pledgee take the benefits of the res? Pledge did not allow it, there would have been theft (furtum usus). In fact, the thing given as pledge was excluded from any economic use. However, Roman law attests an agreement called ἀντίχρησις, which allowed the creditor to have the fruits of the res, under some conditions. Among the jurists only Marcianus uses this Greek term (in D.13,7,33 and D.20,1,11,1).

In this paper, I wish to demonstrate that the antichresis has become part of Roman legal thought. The legal sources attest a late appearance of the antichresis (very late 2nd and early 3rd century AD), but some Severian constitutions suggest that it may already have been known in practice. The Greek word indicated its foreign origin, but Roman jurists called it simply pignus.

Summary

In Belgium, from 1796 until 1867, infanticide was a crime which was legally defined as the deliberate homicide of a new-born child and punished with the death penalty. In the province of West Flanders, for a long time the second most populous province in Belgium, this crime was strongly women-related. As in the other Belgian provinces and abroad, this crime was mainly committed by unmarried domestic servants who lived with their employer and with whom there was no time nor a place for a mother with a child. Infanticide was a crime that was prosecuted before the Court of Assizes of West Flanders and its predecessors. Such prosecutions happened rather exceptionally (109 people in all were prosecuted in West Flanders over a period of 70 years, i.e. an average of 1.5 per year), albeit in a steadily increasing line and with a peak during the years 1850-1867. The Court of Assizes punished this crime only very exceptionally with the statutory death penalty (only in 34 cases, i.e. 31% of the 109 accused). The other 75 accused were either acquitted (58 cases, i.e. 53% of the accused) or punished for another offence (17 cases, i.e. 15.5% of the accused). The acquittals and the punishments for another offence were not the result of the jurors’ or professional judges’ inclination to accept the puerperal insanity of the accused women, but a consequence of the fact that it was exceedingly difficult to prove that a child had been born viable, had lived independently of the mother for a while, and had been killed with the clear intention of killing it, when the child’s mother had given birth without assistance and claimed that the child had been still-born or died from a natural cause.