the year of the institution of this tribunal as the starting-point of the system which we know by the name of the Roman-Dutch Law.[1]
unequal in the various provinces. The reception of the Roman Law was by no means equally complete in all the provinces of the Dutch Netherlands.[2] It was most far-reaching in Friesland, least so in Overijssel and Drenthe. The other provinces lay at various points between these extremes. It follows that the laws of no two provinces were precisely the same. There is no reason why we should not, if we please, include all these systems imder the name of ‘Roman-Dutch Law’. In practice, however, the phrase is usually applied more particularly to the law of the province of Holland. This is accounted for partly by the hegemony, constantly tending to domination, which Holland exercised over the other provinces during the whole continuance of the Republic, partly by the fact that the principal writers upon the romanized law of the Dutch Netherlands belonged to this province.
The extent of the reception matter of controversy.
If we ask to what extent the Roman Law was received in the Netherlands in general and in the province of Holland in particular, we incur the risk of taking sides in a controversy of rival schools.[3] There are those who regard Grotius, Van Leeuwen, Voet, and the other romanists as traitors to the law of their country, which, it is inferred, they enslaved to an alien system. So far as the issue is purely historical the present writer does not offer an opinion. For the lawyer, he submits, the question is not what the law was when these jurists wrote, but what it was when they had written. In the history of institutions it is sometimes more important to know what was thought to be true than to know what was true in fact. At all events, no one disputes the fact of the reception of the
