6.-17.04. külastab õigusteaduskonda dr. Vanessa Duss Jacobi Luzerni Ülikoolist ning õpetab teaduskonna Tallinna osas kursust P2OG.01.114 European Legal Thinking

Loengud toimuvad Tallinnas, Kaarli pst 3:

6.04., 10.04., 13.04., 17.04. kl 15:00-16:30

7.-8.04., 14.-15.04. kl 15:00-18:00

European Legal Thinking Module Description 2015.pdf

Continental European law strongly relies on written legal sources such as codes. Thus, theoretically, legal scholars from European nation states have similar approaches to handling the written sources when working on a concrete legal case. Still, the respective national legal tradition a lawyer first was trained in strongly influences the way she/he will interpret and apply the law to the facts of a case. To a significant extent this phenomenon can be attributed to different schools of legal thinking, which have found their way into the national codes and academic traditions. They lie between the lines of the respective sources and are often influencing unnoticedly the reasoning adopted. In order to understand these approaches of both lawmakers and lawyers it is very helpful to acquaint oneself with the thinking of those persons, which have had long-lasting influence on the formation of national law & legal thinking.

In order to grasp the context of the works of Europe’s keenest legal thinkers we have to go back to the roots and acquaint us with the more than two thousand year old tradition of ancient Roman law. Already a glance at the titles of the main works of Carl Friedrich von Savigny (1779-1861) History of Roman law in the Middle Age (1815-31) and The System of today’s Roman Law (1840-49) displays the everlasting impact on European legal tradition. Accordingly, the course will follow a timeline which starts in the age of classic Roman law and antique elocution – a powerful means of rhetoric –, then covers the renaissance of jurisprudence in the High Middle Ages and Early Modern Era and finishes with the capstone of this private law tradition, namely Bernhard Windscheid’s ‘Lehrbuch des Pandektenrechts’, which heavily influenced the German Civil Code. The selection of legal thinkers is either motivated by the outstanding quality of their works (cf. Cicero, Papinian, Accursius und Savigny) or their paramount influence on our understanding of law (cf. Svarez and Rabel) or a combination of both.

1) The Roman Foundations of Law: Cicero, Papinian and Tribonian 2) The Renaissance of Roman Law in the Middle ages: Accursius, Baldus and Zasius 3) The Foundations of the Common Law: Edward Coke 4) The Labyrinth of Creditors: Salgado de Somoza 5) Legal Concepts of the Age of Enlightenment: Thomasius 6) Early Codification: Carl Gottlieb Svarez 7) The Pandectist Tradition: Friedrich von Savigny 8) The ‘Interessensjurisprudenz’/Jurisprudence of Interests: Rudolf von Jhering 9) The Foundations of the German Civil Code (BGB): Bernhard Windscheid 10) From Comparative to a Uniform Sales Law: Ernst Rabel 11) Current Private Law Methodology: Karl Larenz and Claus-Wilhelm Canaris.

Vanessa Duss Jacobi studied law at the University of Zurich and obtained her PhD in 2009 with a work in legal theory and legal history on interdependencies between jurisprudence and private law codification in Switzerland. She passed her State Law Attorney’s Licence in 2010. 2009 to 2012, as a post-doc, coordinated an interdisciplinary postgraduate programme and 2012 to 2013 the interdisciplinary Competence Center in Research overarching all three faculties of University of Lucerne (Theology, Humanities and Social Sciences and Law). Since 2014 she works as a project leader for the introduction of a research information system. She teaches European legal history at University of Mannheim and subjects of the fundament of law at University of Lucerne. Research interests: Legal History, Judicial History, Legal Theory, Legal Philosophy, Law and Society Perspectives, Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Approaches. https://www.unilu.ch/fileadmin/forschung/tenor/dok/CV_Duss.pdf