214 Timehri. 
DEVELOPMENT OF Roman-DutcH Law. 
Roman-Dutch law is a system which came to its highest perfection in the 16th‘ 
17th and 18th centuries and at the beginning of the 19th ceased to develop owing 
to its bolition in its nursery, the great Dutch law schools of Utrecht and Leyden 
and the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. It grew up through the grafting of 
the Teutonic provincial and tribal customs upon the Roman law of the Emperor 
Justinian which had been introduced into the Netherlands by sovereigns imbued 
with the traditions of Roman imperial administration and by ecclesiastics 
anxious to advance the religious influence of Rome. Feudal law from its home 
among the Franks of France and canon law, which may be <aid to be almost 
enti ely Roman, affected it in later times. The Placaats or Ordinances of various 
Sovereign authoritie modified it, generally in the direction of the Roman 
tradition, and in many cases still hold good. Purely Teutonic customs of 
greit importance, however, continued to survive ; notably community of goods 
and the rules of inheritance on intestacy. 
Finally a remarkable body of able Jurists, professors at Leyden or Utrecht or 
practitioners of the courts, brought together this agglomeration into a more or less 
coherent and systematic whole. These may be said to begin with Grotius in 
the 16th century. They reached their greatest authority in Voet in the 17th 
and their line closed with Van der Keesel and Van der Linden in the 18th and early 
19th centuries. I had almost said they sang their swan song with the last two, 
but one cannot associate music in any form with the terse, sober, and unimag- 
inative pronouncements of these mighty men. This was the most remarkable 
body of Jurists the world has ever produced since the days of the great lawyers of 
the Roman Empire. Their work was either the outcome of their own University 
lectures like the productions of Voet, Van der Keesel and Mattheeus or was a 
compilation of the opinions of the leading practitioners of the writers’ time like 
the Hollandsche and Utrechtsche Consultatien of the middle of the 17th century. 
These authorities are naturally of varying value under the circumstances. Their 
views frequently conflict upon the most important points, although with 
many judges the pronouncements of Voet in his Commentaries on the Pandeets 
published as long ago as 1698 are likely to outweigh even the massed opinions of 
his colleagues. In this country especially the Commentaries have been styled 
with some justice the Bible of the Bench. 
In South Africa this system remained after the capitulation of 1803 as the 
treasured inheritance of a population predominantly Dutch and likely from all 
appearances to remain so in race however loyal to the British connect.on. Racial 
pride, local patriotism and long custom have wedded them to ther common law, 
Litigants, lawyers and Judges have been bred up in its atmosphere. They have 
even clung to its criminal branch, although borrowing liberally from British 
sources both as to substantive law and as to procedure. Their large population 
makes a system of courts available which, crowned as it now is by the Supreme 
Court of the Union, makes South Africa practically autonomous so far as liti- 
gation is concerned. Appeals to the Privy Council have been few and are now 
likely to be as rare as angels’ visits. 
