that day in England "the law of the great men has become the law of the whole people." Its purely German spirit has developed it, without a catastrophe, from a feudal régime of unparalleled stringency into the institutions of the present day which have become law in Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Even apart from the extent of its power, it is the most instructive in West Europe. Its development, unlike that of the rest, did not lie in the hands of theoretical jurists. The study of Roman law at Oxford was not allowed to touch practice; and at Merton in 1236 the higher nobility expressly rejected it. The Bench itself continued to develop the old law-material by means of creative precedents, and it was these practical decisions ("Reports") that formed the basis of law-books such as that of Bracton.[1] Since then, and to this day, a statute law, kept living and progressive by the court decisions, and a common law, which always vividly underlies the legislation, exist side by side, without its ever becoming necessary for the representatives of the people to make single large efforts at codification.
In the South, the law of the German-Roman codices above mentioned prevailed — in southern France the Visigothic (called the droit écrit in contrast to the Frankish droit coutumier of the north), and in Italy the Lombard (which was the most important of them, was almost purely Germanic, and held its own till well into the Renaissance). Pavia became a study-centre for German law and produced about 1070 the "Expositio," by far the greatest achievement of juridical science in the age, and immediately after it a code, the "Lombarda."[2] The legal evolution of the entire South was broken off by Napoleon's Code Civil, which took its place. But this in turn has become in all Latin lands and far beyond them the basis for further creative work — and hence, after the English, it is the most important.
In Germany, the movement that set in so powerfully with the Gothic tribal laws (Sachsenspiegel, 1230; Schwabenspiegel, 1274) frittered itself away to nullity. A host of petty civic and territorial rights went on springing up until indignation with the facts induced an unreal political romanticism in dreamers and enthusiasts, the Emperor Maximilian among them, and law came under attack with the rest. The Diet of Worms in 1495 framed its "Kammergerichtsordnung"[3] after an Italian model. Now there was not only the "Holy Roman Empire" on German ground, but "Roman law" as German common-law. The old German procedures were exchanged for Italian. The judges had to study their law beyond the Alps, and obtained their experience not from the ambient life, but from a logic-chopping philology. In this country alone are to be found, later, the ideologues for whom the Corpus Juris is an ark to be defended against the profanation of realities.
