Gaius Meets Cicero. Law and Rhetoric in the School Controversies sheds new light on a much debated issue in the field of Roman law, i.e. the so-called 'school controversies' between the Sabinians and the Proculians. Tessa Leesen rejects the general assumption in modern literature that the two schools each adhered to a fundamentally different theoretical conception of law. She argues that the 'school controversies' as described in Gaius' Institutiones arose in legal practice when the heads of the two schools were consulted by two conflicting parties and each gave opposing advice....

What is the relevance of law to a world dominated by a hegemon? What is the relation between power and law at the international level? In this volume, these questions are approached based on a case study of relations between France and the Netherlands throughout the Revolutionary Wars. It shows that power and law are not isolated phenomena and that their relation is not as one-dimensional as it is commonly portrayed. Law can be an instrument of power, while law poses a normative force even a superpower cannot ignore. Thereto, the case study sketches a context in which an international law...

The current French, German and Dutch Law of Contract each offer a remedy of specific performance to creditors suffering from breach of contract. This book analyses the alterations to this remedy during the nineteenth century on the substantive, procedural and enforcement levels. Fascinatingly, there is a link between changes to the remedy and the development of early human rights and the mass industrialisation of society. The latter had the effect of actually converging the national remedies of specific performance in the examined systems: damages and rescission became more accessible as...

The Roman legal tradition is the ancestor of modern contract law but there is no agreement as to how and when a general law of contract emerged. Wim Decock's thesis is that an important step in this evolution was taken by theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They transformed the Roman legal tradition (ius commune) by insisting on the moral foundations of contract law. Theologians emphasized that the enforceability of contracts is based on voluntary consent and that a contract should not enrich one party at another's expense. While their main concern was the salvation of...