English Law and the Renaissance - 1901 Author:Frederic William Maitland Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: :i introduced any substantive law of Roman origin. At a later time when it began to steal work (suits for legacies and the like) from the ecclesiastical court... more »s, it naturally borrowed the rules by which those matters had theretofore been governed. The Reception A full history of the Reception in Scotland seems to be a desideratum. But see Goudy, Fate of Roman Law (Inaugural Lecture), 1894; also J. M. Irvine, Roman Law in Greeds Encyclopedia of the Law of Scotland. Whether at any time the Reception in Scotland ran the length that it ran in Germany may be doubted; but the influence exercised by English example since 1603 would deserve the historian's consideration. Even if this influence went no further than the establishment of the habit of rinding 'authority' in decided cases, it would be of great importance. Where such a habit is established in practice and sanctioned by theory, any return to the pure text, such as that which was preached in Germany by ' the historical school,' would be impossible. Also it may be suggested that the Roman law which played upon the law of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not always very Roman, but was strongly clashed with ' Natural Law.' For instance, if in Scotland the firm of partners is a ' legal person,' this is not due to the influence of Roman law as it is now understood by famous expositors, or as it was understood in the middle ages. Also (to take another example) it seems impossible to get the Scotch 'trust' out of Romanlaw by any fair process. The suggestion that it is 'a contract made up of the two nominate contracts of deposit and mandate' seems a desperate effort to romanize what is not Roman. M Fertile, Storia del diritto italiano, ed. 2, vol. The persistence II. (2), p. 69 : ' Laonde puo dirsi che 1' abr...« less