Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The early Middle Ages: a comparative approach
- 2 A historical and institutional profile of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries
- 3 Excursus I: ‘Barbarians’
- 4 Historical and institutional profiles of the ‘new dominations’
- 5 Excursus II : The days of the week
- 6 Excursus III: Anglo-Saxon charters
- 7 Consensus by assembly
- 8 Excursus IV: Authority and consensus in judicial decisions
- 9 Public allegiance
- 10 Excursus V: The Anglo-Saxon writ
- 11 Private allegiance
- 12 Open legal systems
- 13 Excursus VI: Textual ‘coincidences’ in documentary forms
- Chronology of popes and sovereigns
- Appendix of sources
- Bibliography
- Index
12 - Open legal systems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The early Middle Ages: a comparative approach
- 2 A historical and institutional profile of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries
- 3 Excursus I: ‘Barbarians’
- 4 Historical and institutional profiles of the ‘new dominations’
- 5 Excursus II : The days of the week
- 6 Excursus III: Anglo-Saxon charters
- 7 Consensus by assembly
- 8 Excursus IV: Authority and consensus in judicial decisions
- 9 Public allegiance
- 10 Excursus V: The Anglo-Saxon writ
- 11 Private allegiance
- 12 Open legal systems
- 13 Excursus VI: Textual ‘coincidences’ in documentary forms
- Chronology of popes and sovereigns
- Appendix of sources
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Wargusy extra sermonem, útlah: the outlaw
Every type of community has mechanisms of exclusion which stop short of actually killing the person to whom they are applied. Scholars who start from this simple premise and fail to explore the matter further tend to lump together the most disparate legal phenomena, discerning continuities and similarities rather than distinctions and differences. The comparative analysis in the present book has constantly kept to an intermediate level of abstraction, to principia: close to regulae and supported by them, but also close to ethical and political approaches and validated by them. In this concluding chapter I shall take the method to its limits, examining themes of such central importance as to test the validity of the method itself.
It is precisely these centred themes which tend to foster intellectual laziness; theories that have never been thoroughly proved are often assumed to be true merely because they are generally endorsed. Consuetudo docendi smothers quaestio veritatis.
Caesar tells of the punishment meted out by the Druids of Gaul to people who failed to comply with their decisions.
If any individual or tribe does not comply with their decisions, they forbid them to take part in the sacrifices. This is a very serious punishment among them. All those who are thus excluded are deemed impious and wicked; all shun them and will neither listen nor speak to them for fear of being infected by their disadvantages; their demands for justice go unheeded, and no public office is conferred upon them.
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- The Origins of the European Legal Order , pp. 368 - 436Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000