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Catalan Lawyers, Liberalism, and Codification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Extract

Kenneth Ledford's thoughtful and poignant commentary has highlighted a number of intriguing theoretical issues that will be debated as the study of modern Catalonia continues to make inroads into various disciplines within the Anglo-Saxon academy. Acknowledging Ledford's observations, I limit my response to clarifying three points: (1) the degree to which the Barcelona legal profession was unified; (2) lawyers and liberalism; and (3) the challenge that Catalan exceptionalism poses to Weberian modernization. In order to address these issues, I expand the scope of this response beyond that of the original article.

Type
Forum: Response
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2002

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References

1. See Ledford, Kenneth F., “Codification and Normativity: Catalan ‘Exception’ and European ‘Norm,’Law and History Review 20 (2002): 385–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The epigraph at the beginning of this response is from Flaubert, Gustave, Sentimental Education, trans. Baldick, Robert (London: Penguin, 1964), 180–81.Google Scholar

2. See Stephen Jacobson, “Law and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Case of Catalonia in Comparative Perspective,” ibid., 307–17.

The information that follows concerning lawyers and liberalism is derived from two related articles that I have published. See Jacobson, Stephen, “Droit et politique dans l'Espagne du XIXe siècle. Les avocats barcelonais et les particularités du libéralisme catalan,” Genèses 45 (December 2001): 426CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Advocats a Barcelona, 1830–1880” in Societal, política i cultura a Catalunya (1830–1880), ed. Fradera, Josep Maria, Barcelona. Quaderns d'Història 6 (2002) (forthcoming).Google Scholar

3. See. for example, the debates in the Senate between the Supreme Court magistrate Benito Ulloa y Rey and the Catalan lawyer Josep Maluquer. Diario de las sesiones de Cortes. Senado, 21 February 1885, 1291–95, 1315–21.

4. Here I follow Whitman, James Q., The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 229–34.Google Scholar