Paul Roubier and the Medieval Doctors
(On an Unfair Opinion)
Abstract
In 1949 Paul Roubier, one of the leading jurists in the study of transitional law, was invited by the Commission for the Reform of the French Civil Code, chaired by Léon Julliot de la Morandière, to present a draft of permanent rules of conflict to be incorporated into the new Code that was being planned. These, with some changes, were later incorporated in the Avant-Projet de Code Civil, Articles 26 to 33 of the Preliminary Title.
A few years earlier, in his well-known book Les conflits des lois dans le temps. Théorie dite de la non-rétroactivité des lois (Roubier, 1929-1933), in the historical part of his research, the jurist made a bold assertion: that the works of the medieval doctors, especially the glossators and post-glossators, together with the canonists, had no more than historical importance and that today’s jurist could well do without them.
From comparing this judgement with that work, I noticed a curiosity: the rules that emerge from the medieval writings, and the reasoning of the canonists, are similar to the rules of Roubier’s Project or, at least, their foundation can be traced in them. Highlighting this similarity, and the injustice of the criticism, is the object of this article.
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