• Mausen Yves

• Mausen Yves

In the academic year 2025/26, this course will be streamed.

The course starts during the fourth week of the semester.

Starting with general questions about justice and alternative dispute resolutions as a Christian ideal, the course then focuses on the Roman judiciary and the English Common law courts. Both provide specific examples of a subject-driven, supplementary judicial system rather than one developing according to a gouvernment's decision to expand its own political power as such aiming at a monopolistic situation. For each period the interaction between secular and Church courts is given a particular attention, allowing for another perspective on the same question of the role and nature of State institutions in a context of judicial pluralism. 

Whether history may teach anything useful or even only relevant for today is, honestly speaking, doubtful for certainly each generation prefers to live its own experiences and, also, concerning law specifically, each generation is faced with its own social and ideological necessities and demands. If there is a lesson to be learnt from history it derives less from the precise knowledge of such or such concrete element or fact to be imitated or on the contrary to be shunned, than from the realisation that over the course of the centuries and through the various cultural environments there have been numerous different answers to given problems, problems which still haunt us today. In this way legal history is equivalent to comparative law and offers the same kind of insights: the understanding that our own rules are but relative and contingent and, thus, the ability to imagine new and different ways towards a life in society.

The exam takes the form of an oral examination of 15 minutes.

The exam takes the form of an oral examination of 15 minutes.