INTRODUCTION

In the West, since the time of the Roman jurists, the task of understanding and interpreting the law has usually belonged to a distinct class which a person can enter only after a long period of specialised study. Its members are united, not so much by agreement as to their conclusions, but by a common understanding of how conclusions are to be reached. They share a method which enables each jurist to arrive at opinions of his own and to explain why he agrees or disagrees with those of other jurists.

This chapter is about the method of the medieval civilians who expounded Roman law from the twelfth century, when the study of Roman law was revived, through the fourteenth century, when they produced their last great works.

Their task, as they conceived it, was to explain the texts compiled by the emperor Justinian in the sixth century and which became known as the Corpus iuris civilis. The largest part of the compilation, the Digest, was made up of short extracts from Roman jurists. Nevertheless, the method of the medieval civilians was unlike that of the Roman jurists. It will be helpful to say a few words about the Roman jurists in order to see how it was different.

Some scholars, such as Fritz Schultz and Peter Stein, believe that the Roman jurists learned to think systematically from the Greeks, and in particular from philosophers such as Aristotle. While the jurists' method was systematic, nevertheless it did not work in the same way.