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IURIS HISTORIA: LIBER AMICORUM GERO DOLEZALEK. Ed by Vincenzo Colli and Emanuele Conte Berkeley, California: Robbins Collection Publications (www.law.berkeley.edu/robbins), Studies in Comparative Legal History, 2008. xxiv + 431 pp. ISBN 9781882239184. US$50.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Pages336-337
Published date01 May 2010
DOI10.3366/elr.2010.0014
Date01 May 2010
AuthorWilliam M Gordon

Gero Dolezalek is now an established figure on the Scottish legal historical scene with his contributions to identification of the often garbled references to ius commune sources in Sinclair's Practicks and other fruits of his researches while he held the chair of Civil Law in Aberdeen (2005–2009). Scottish legal historians will be further indebted to him when, shortly, the Stair Society publishes his work Scotland under the Ius Commune: Census of Manuscripts of Legal Literature mainly between 1500–1650. This tribute to him in the book under review, however, comes in the main from scholars, both friends and pupils (not necessarily to be placed in separate categories of course), who for the most part deal with issues in or related to, the medieval law, civil and canon, of which Gero Dolezalek is a master. As is usual in such collections there is a great variety of contributions, 27 in all in five languages, together with an appreciation of Dolezalek's contribution to the study of medieval law and its sources by the editors of the volume and a list of his publications between 1966 and 2005, including those on the internet. Many of the contributions indeed have direct reference to work which he has done or inspired, making the volume a tribute in more than one sense. There is no index of subjects or texts, the latter of which particularly would have involved enormous labour, helpful as indexes would have been. The riches have to be found by inspection which is no bad thing and readers are, not unnaturally, expected to be familiar with abbreviations for the sources and periodical articles which are liberally cited.

The subjects touched on range chronologically from the Florentine manuscript of the Digest and its history (A Belloni at 1–16 and A Ciaralli at 17–35) to the original but now amended provisions of the BGB on the liability of the seller for defects in the object sold and their relation to D 19.1.6.4, the interpretation of which is significantly altered by a change of punctuation found in some Leipzig manuscripts of the Digest (M Reinkenhof at 423–431). The contributions also vary considerably in length with those by the editors among the most substantial: E Conte of the University of Rome (on politics and law in the twelfth century) points out that law was not a purely intellectual pursuit of the best interpretation of the sources so that the revived law of the former Roman empire could be used to support the claims of Italian communes to...

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