Guido Rossi (ed), Authorities in Early Modern Law Courts

DOI10.3366/elr.2021.0724
Author
Pages401-402
Date01 September 2021
Published date01 September 2021

Who makes the law? This volume considers the question from the perspective of early-modern courts, deliberately departing from a traditional focus on universities. Some chapters cover the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; others are more limited. There is a clustering in the later-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Chapters focus on particular places or jurisdictions, from Britain in the west to Poland and Sweden (including Finland) in the east. From Sweden the volume descends to Portugal in the south. There is an impressive and welcome breadth to this collection and helpful introductions to possibly unfamiliar jurisdictions.

Any discussion of “authorities” is faced with the challenge of that word's meaning. European lawyers would have recognised the argument ab autoritate as legitimate within both the logical and rhetorical traditions. But what constituted “authorities” is a much more complex matter. Alain Wijffels warns readers about accepting a nineteenth-century paradigm of a simple hierarchy of authorities, while John Ford's thoughtful chapter on the Court of Session uses material from the history of ideas to suggest how authorities in a legal system can change.

Ford draws out underpinning ideas of sovereignty and political thought in the views about authorities...

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