Protestant Ecclesiastical Law and the Ius Commune

Protestants almost never called their ecclesiastical norms ‘canons.’ When Protestant jurists or theologians wrote ‘canon law’ (Ius canonicum) in their works, it was clear to their readers that they meant Roman canon law. Surprisingly, Protestant jurists often cited Roman canon law and its jurisprudence long after Martin Luther burned books of Roman canon law at the Elster gate in Wittenberg. These jurists also continued to teach courses at the universities that treated the Ius canonicum. Consequently, an essay on Protestant canon law must confront the question: how much Roman canon law and the jurisprudence of the medieval Ius commune remained embedded in the Reformers’ legislation and jurisprudence and how much was rejected? Until relatively recently scholars answered that question largely according to their confessional affiliations

Reform in 1215: Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council

By 1215 King John had lost almost all of his northern continental possessions. The core of the Angevin empire, Normandy, was lost. Anglo-French barons who still held lands in Normandy owed their primary allegiance to King Phillip Augustus, not to King John. The barons and churchmen who remained under his sovereignty chaffed under his rule. It is clear from the document that the barons forced John to sign when they met with John on Runnymede in 15 July 2015, they intended to impose reform on the king. We might sum up their objectives as being the administration of justice and defending their customary rights in what remained of the John’s kingdom

The Biography of Gratian, the Father of Canon Law

The research on the pre-Vulgate manuscripts has been enormously interesting and, not surprisingly, has created areas of disagreement about aspects of Gratian’s life, work, and teaching. These scholarly debates have given birth to a fruitful and vigorous exploration into the teaching and development of law in the first half of the twelfth century.5 The issues are many. Perhaps the most important is the lack of consensus about how long Gratian worked on the Decretum and how long he taught. That will be the focus of this Essay

Learned Law, Droit Savant, Gelehrtes Recht: The Tyranny of a Concept

I would like to make several points in this essay. First, the historians of national legal systems are still, by and large, balkanized. They study, explain, and trace the history of their legal systems with only a cursory nod in the direction of the Ius commune. Second, within the Ius commune, some historians still approach a topic as if its various parts can be studied in isolation. A Romanist will study a doctrine of Roman law as if canon and feudal law had only tangential influence on the development of the thought of the civilians