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Article: The moral menace of Roman law and the making of commerce: some Dutch evidence.
- Article from:
- The Yale Law Journal
- Article date:
- May 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Yale University, School of Law. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Did Roman law represent a kind of moral menace in premodern Europe, encouraging commercialism, greed, and exploitativeness, and fostering a lifeless "rationalism"? In one version or another, this idea has been accepted by Europeans for centuries. Petrarch was already warning his readers in the Middle Ages that the practice of Roman law was a nursery of corrupt and mercenary values;(1) and in the early-modern period many Europeans took the same view.(2) Even in modern times, some of our greatest legal historians have put their authority behind the idea that Roman law was somehow morally menacing. The most famous scholarly version of the idea came from Heinrich Brunner, who, ...