Some Thoughts on Michigan\u27s Copy of the Argentoratene Gratian

The five hundredth birthday of anything calls for a celebration. Certainly the five hundredth anniversary of a book as extraordinary as the Michigan Law Library\u27s copy of the Argentoratene edition (so called from the Latin name of the city of Strassbourg where the book was printed) of Gratian\u27s Decretum calls for some sort of memorial. Kenneth Boyce\u27s piece, which follows this one, tells something about the book itself, where it came from and how it got to Michigan. This piece deals with its contents

What Causes Fundamental Legal Ideas? Marital Property in England and France in the Thirteenth Century

Categorizing broadly, the marital property systems of the Western nations today are divided into two types: those in which husband and wife own all property separately except those items that they have expressly agreed to hold jointly (in a nontechnical sense) and those in which husband and wife own a substantial portion or even all of their property jointly unless they have expressly agreed to hold it separately. The system of separate property is the common law system, in force in most jurisdictions where the Anglo-American common law is in force. The system of joint property is the community property system, in force in eight American states and many of the countries of Western Europe. From jurisdiction to jurisdiction, however, there is considerable variation in the distinction\u27s significance for the spouses\u27 powers to modify the system before marriage and to control property during the marriage and for what happens to property when the marriage dissolves. Further, the distinction between the two systems has blurred noticeably over the past generation. But despite the variation and despite the blurring, separate property and community property are quite different ways of thinking about property-holding within the family unit, one of those fundamental distinctions in legal ideas that affects the way legal results are reached, if not always the result itself

Schiller: An American Experience in Roman Law

A Review of An American Experience in Roman Law by A. Arthur Schille

Comparative Family Law: Law and Social Change?

A Review of State, Law and Family: Family Law in Transition in the United States and Western Europe by Mary Ann Glendo

An Upbeat View of English Justice in the Fourteenth Century

The late Middle Ages are history\u27s stepchild. Traditionally, medievalists are not interested in them. The earlier centuries, culminating in the twelfth and thirteenth, are much more typically medieval. Traditionally too, early modern historians are interested in the late Middle Ages only for what they see as origins of the Reformation, or for decay of feudal structures out of which the national monarchies of the sixteenth century arose, or for Italian humanism, which they call the Renaissance. Legal historians, on the other hand, are stuck with the late Middle Ages. With a few exceptions (including, most notably, the great run of central royal court records from thirteenth-century England), the fourteenth is the first century in which we can first see what is really going on in the courts. Legal sources multiply, and much of the material was printed in the sixteenth century, so it is possible to make some progress without painstakingly going through manuscripts. Recently, there has been an increased interest among historians in the later Middle Ages, particularly in the fourteenth century. The fourteenth century was not unlike the twentieth, a period of uncertainty and contradictions. In philosophy, it was the century of William of Ockham, as the thirteenth had been the century of Thomas Aquinas. Ockham\u27s thought may not be much like what is reported under his name in Umberto Eco\u27s The Name of the Rose, but it is close enough that an imaginative author can suggest a connection between Ockham and modern deconstructionists