Priests of the Law —— Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals

----- 法律的牧师罗马法和制定普通法的第一批专业人员

ISBN: 9780198845454 出版年：2019 页码：305 McSweeney, Thomas J Oxford University Press

Priests of the Law tells the story of the first people in the history of the common law to think of themselves as legal professionals: the group of justices who wrote the celebrated treatise known as Bracton. It offers a new interpretation of Bracton and its authors. Bracton was not so much an attempt to explain or reform the early common law as it was an attempt to establish the status and authority of the king’s justices. The justices who wrote it were some of the first people to work full-time in England’s royal courts, at a time when they had no obvious model for the legal professional. They found one in an unexpected place: the Roman-law tradition that was sweeping across Europe in the thirteenth century. They modelled themselves on the jurists of Roman law who were teaching in Italy and France. In Bracton and other texts they produced, the justices of the royal courts worked hard to establish that the nascent common-law tradition was just one constituent part of the Roman-law tradition. Through their writing, this small group of people, working in the courts of an island realm, imagined themselves to be part of a broader European legal culture. They made the case that they were not merely servants of the king. They were priests of the law.