Roman-Dutch law

Roman-Dutch law (Dutch: Rooms-Hollands recht, Afrikaans: Romeins-Hollandse reg) is a casuistic (judge-made) legal system based on Roman law as applied in the Netherlands in the 17th and 18th centuries. As such, it is a variety of the European continental civil law or ius commune. While Roman-Dutch law was superseded by Napoleonic codal law in the Netherlands proper as early as the beginning of the 19th century, Roman-Dutch law is still applied by the courts of South Africa (and its neighbours Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe), Guyana, Indonesia, East Timor, and Sri Lanka. It was largely drawn upon by Scots law. It also had some negligible impact on New York state,^[1] especially in introducing the office of prosecutor (schout).

History

Roman law was progressively abandoned during the early Middle Ages. The Theodosian Code and excerpts of latter-day imperial enactments (constitutiones) were well known in the successor Germanic states and vital to maintaining the commonplace principle of folk-right which applied pre-existing Roman law to Roman provincials and Germanic law to Germans. The Breviary of Alaric and the Lex Gundobada Romana are two of the several hybrid Romano-Germanic law codes that incorporated much Roman legal material. However, because the fall of the Western Roman Empire preceded the drafting of the Justinianiac Code, early Byzantine law was never influential in Western Europe. Also, much of this early law was superseded by later feudal law. Only canon law successfully retained any substantial amount of Roman law to be influential.

Interest in the doctrines of Byzantine lawyers came when—around the year a.d. 1070—a copy of the Digest of Emperor Justinian I found its way into northern Italy. Scholars in the emerging University of Bologna, who previously had access to only a limited portion of the Justinianiac code, sparked an intellectual rediscovery of Roman law through the teaching of law based on Byzantine law texts. Courts gradually applied Byzantine law—as taught in Bologna (and soon elsewhere)—first as law in subsidium to be applied when there was no local statute or custom in point, and later because judicial officers (judges, magistrates, assessors) felt that its refined legal concepts were more apt to solve complex cases than the customary laws of western and central Europe. This process, referred to as reception, took place in the Holy Roman Empire and the Mediterranean in the 13th-14th centuries, but was much slower to come to northern Europe (e.g., Saxony, Northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia).

In the 15th century, reception in complexu reached the Netherlands while it was one of Germany's feudal dependencies. While Italian lawyers (modus italicus) were the first to contribute to the new Byzantine-based jurisprudence, in the 16th century, French humanistic doctrinal scholars (modus gallicus) were most influential. In the 17th and 18th century, it was the Dutch who had the greatest influence. Members of the Hollandse Elegante School (“school of elegant jurisprudence”; 1500–1800) included Hugo Grotius, Johannes Voet, Ulrich Huber, Noodt, J. and F. van de Sande, and many others. These scholars managed to merge Roman law with legal concepts taken from traditional Dutch feudal customary law, especially from the province of Holland. The resulting mixture was predominantly Roman, but it contained some features which were characteristically Dutch: this mixture is known as Roman-Dutch law. The Dutch applied their legal system in their colonial empire. In so doing, the distinctly Dutch branch of civil law (or ius commune) came to be applied in far-flung places, e.g., the Dutch East Indies, Dutch West Indies, Cape Colony, and Dutch Ceylon.^[2]:156-157

In the Netherlands, Roman-Dutch law abruptly ended when, in 1809, the Dutch puppet state—the Kingdom of Holland—adopted the French Napoleonic Code, a different system but nonetheless a branch of civil law. Yet, in the then-Dutch colonies, French law was never introduced during or after the Napoleonic era. As a result, Roman-Dutch law has managed to survive to this day, usually in a hybrid form mixed with English law, otherwise known as “Anglo-Dutch law”.

References

See also

• South African law
• Scots law

External links

• A very good collection of resources maintained by professor Ernest Metzger.
• The Roman Law Library by Professor Yves Lassard and Alexandr Koptev