Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/212

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198 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S that Archbishop Lanfranc studied when as a young man he was a shining hght in the school of Pavia, but because this body of Lombard law, having once become the subject of systematic study, showed a remarkable vitality in its struggle with Roman jurisprudence. Those Italian doctors of the middle age who claimed for their science the fealty of all mankind might have been forced to admit that all was not well at home. They might call this Lombard law ius asininum and the law of brute beasts, but it lingered on, and indeed I read that it was not utterly driven from the kingdom of Naples until Joseph Bonaparte published the French code. Law schools make tough law."® Very rarely do we see elsewhere the academic teaching of any law that is not Roman : imperially or papally Roman. As a matter of course the universities had the two legal faculties, unless, as at Paris, the Pope excluded the legists from an ecclesiastical preserve. The voice of John Wyclif I pleading that English law was the law that should be I taught in English universities was a voice that for centuries J cried in the wilderness. It was 1679 before French law ob- J^ tained admission into the French universities.*^' It was 1709 before Georg Beyer, a pandectist at Wittenberg, set a prec- edent for lectures on German law in a German university.'^* •"Fertile, Storia del diritto italiano, ed. 2, vol. ii. (2), p. 69: " Laonde pu6 dirsi che 1' abrogazione definitiva ed espressa della legislazione longobardica nel regno di Napoli non abbia avuto luogo se non al principio del nostro secolo, sotto Giuseppe Bonaparte, al momento in ' cui vennero publicati cola i codici francesi." On p. 65 will be found some of the opprobrious phrases that the civilians applied to Lombard law: "nee meretur ius Lombardorum lex appellari sed faex": "non sine ratione dominus Andreas de Isernia vocat leges illas ius asininum." "Esmein, Histoire du droit franqais, ed. 2, p. 757: " C'est seulement en 1679 que I'enseignement du droit franqais re^ut une place bien modeste dans les universites." Viollet, Histoire du droit civil franqais, p. 217: " Lorsqu'en 1679, Louis XIV. erigea a la faculty de Paris une chaire de droit franqais et une chaire de droit romain, le premier pro- fesseur de droit fran9ais, Fr. de Launay, commenta les Institutes de Loisel, qui prirent ainsi une situation quasi-officielle a c6t6 des Insti- tutes de Justinien." Brissaud, Histoire du droit franqais, p. 237: " Le latin avait ete j usque-la la langue de I'ecole. Le premier professeur en droit franqais a Paris, de Launay, fit son cours en langue franqais." ^Siegel, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, ed. 3, p. 152: "Den ersten und zugleich entscheidenden Schritt in dieser Richtung that Georg Beyer, welcher . . . zunachst durch einen Zufall veranlasst wurde, and der Wit- tenberger Universitat, wohin er als Pandektist berufen worden war, 1707 eine Vorlesung iiber das ius germanicum anzukiindigen und zu halten."