LAW 



The learned and systematic study of law, though 

 never entirely broken off in the Middle Ages, begins 

 virtually for the modern world with the revival of the 

 study of Roman Law under Irnerius at the University 

 of Bologna, in the second half of the looos A. D. From 

 Italy germinated the subsequent growth of legal science 

 in other countries. After four centuries, when the 

 schools of the Glossators and the Commentators had 

 successively risen and fallen in that country, the primacy 

 in legal studies passed to France, which gave to the 

 brilliant Italian Humanist, ALCIAT, a home at Avignon, 

 in 1518, and afterwards at Bourges. " Jurisprudentia 

 romana," said the Englishman Duck in 1650, "si apud 

 alias gentes extincta esset, apud solos Gallos reperiri 

 posset." The "mos Gallicus" had become the fashion 

 in the juristic world; and for two centuries France 

 held this European primacy, under CUJAS, DONEAU, 

 BAUDOUTN, DUMOULIN, BRISSON, DOUAREN, GODEFROI, 

 and HOTMAN. By that time legal science had become 

 more nationalized. Every country of Western Europe 

 was developing its jurists. 



In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries 

 France's great task was the complex one of consolidating 

 and nationalizing its own composite body of law. The 

 labors of DOMAT, D'AGUESSEAU, LAMOIGNON, COLBERT, 

 POTHIER, and others of that period, and the commercial 



1 [Drafting Committee: J. H. BEALE, Harvard University; L. B. 

 REGISTER, University of Pennsylvania; MUNROE SMITH, Columbia Uni- 

 versity; J. H. WIGMORE, Northwestern University. ED.] 



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