The studies conducted so far proved that the House of Lords, executing judicial rights which have been granted till the end of September 2009, referred to the heritage of the Roman law many times. However, against a common opinion, the very practice was not only known in the past, but the low lords used Roman law in their judgments also recently. It is possible to find many references to Roman Law heritage in the judgments given by the Appellate Committee in the last decade. The role of the very practice is proven by the fact that a part of these judgments turned out to be precedents judgments which are currently regularly quoted in English textbooks of law. Such a role is especially played by the following judgments: the judgment from 15 July 1999 concerning Commissioners of Police for the Metropolis v. Reeves treating about the duty of care by the police, the judgment from 18 May 2000 concerning Foskett v. McKeown, which defined a mutual relation of the regulations on an unjustified enrichment and claims deriving from the law of property, the judgment from 20 June 2002 concerning Fairchild v. Glenhaven Funeral Services Ltd., the subject of which was a definition of the principles of employer’s liability for a long-term exposure of employees’ life, the judgment from 13 November 2003 concerning Regina v. City of Sunderland treating about the laws of the citizens of a given place to make use of the so called “town green area”, the judgment from 30 June 2005 concerning Mark v. Mark which had to define the reasons of the choice of the place of living (a domicle) with respect to an illegal stay of a given person in the United Kingdom, and the judgment from 17 October 2007 concerning Moncrieff v. Jameson regarding the servitude right of access.
Our imagination of the matrimonial reality of the Roman world has been haunted by women counting their age by their husbands instead of consuls (Seneca, de ben. 3.16.2) and the notorious Cato - Marcia - Hortensius triangle (Plutarch, Cato 25-27). This stereotypical idea of the poor durability of marriages in Antiquity has been recently challenged in the diligent study of Susan Treggiari who, having counted the divorces present in the classical literary sources (sixty-odd up to the times of Domitian, some of them involving the same individuals), came to the conclusion that this picture is simply a by-product of the topoi of the moralistic and satirical literature. And yet, we must observe that the literature hardly ever deals with the lives of simple people, so the reality may only be retrieved from the documents of legal practice. Prima facie the scarcity of the documentation seems to corroborate the thesis of Treggiari. At present there are less than fifty known deeds dealing directly with divorce, predominantly dated to the Roman and Byzantine eras; some of them are regrettably preserved only very fragmentarily. Yet the view has to be put forward that this may be caused by the fact that not all divorces were documented. The nature of the documents recording divore for the most typical divorce settlements: marriage contracts, census records, petitions of the deserted wives or husbands, show that divorce was part of the 'normal' life ofthe inhabitants of Graeco-Roman Egypt and must have occurred quite frequently. The paper aims at presenting the general format of the divorce settlements, and then gives translations and interpretations of 6 documents relating to divorce. With the aid of these examples a few important research issues are discussed: the relation between theImperial Law and the divorce practice as shown in the papyri: the principle of formless and easy divorce; the gradual limitation of divorces from the times of Constantine the Great and its probably meagre impact on the legal practice; the possible admission ofthe intervention of third parties into divorce (viz. the parents' decision); and finally the question of the possible influence of Christianity on divorce customs (which does not seem to be easily detectable).
The topic of the article is the testamentary succession in the late Roman law, i.e., after the Constitutio Antoniniana of AD 212. The case of the testamentary succession is used to approach a more general question of the role of the local legislative practice in the process of creating law in Late Antiquity. The second purpose of this paper is to discuss whether the Roman law before the 7th century was chiefly of persuasive and instrumental character. In other words, the aim of the article is to illustrate the role of law the local legal practice in the process of creating. The starting point of the discussion is the constitution on the language of wills issued by Alexander Severus which encouraged the legal practice to elaborate a new form of wills and loose red the bonds of the legal formalism.
In the article, the authors deal with the basic features of contracts on the provision of financial services. The definition of these contracts can be found in the relevant financial market regulation. According to that, financial services contract means a contract between a customer and a financial institution under which the financial institution provides the customer with a financial service (in particular a current account agreement, an insurance contract, a credit agreement, a securities purchase contract, a portfolio management contract, a participant agreement, an employer agreement, an old-age pension scheme agreement). One of the parties to these contracts is always the supervised entity on financial market. The authors focus their attention on those contracts whose subject matter is the custody of assets. Particular attention is paid to the institute of interest, which is associated with loan (credit) and deposit agreements. The article points out the basic principles of the legal regulation of these two contracts for the provision of financial services in the historical context, particularly in Roman law. In this context, it should be noted that interest was perceived controversially, especially in the Middle Ages, and was subject to a ban by Catholic Church. Furthermore, the subject of the article is a historical interpretation of the content of the fiduciary relationship, which the authors consider to be a key for the management of assets in the financial market. Thus, the classical fiducia did not represent the appreciation of the entrusted property, but the securing of the claim. In the second part of the paper, the subject of the analysis will be selected issues of regulation of some banking contracts and investment service contracts and the possibility of introducing negative interest rates on bank deposits.
The basis of the consensus buy-sell agreement was the bona fides of both parties. When making an agreement, both a buyer and seller were required to be careful because any manifes- tations of inadequacy and dishonesty grew a property liability of both parties. Client’s careless behavior could consist in a conscious action to the detriment of the partner (dolus), as well as negligence (neglegentia). Judges have referred to the term bona fides since the second century BC when evaluating the situation in which making an agreement was connected with dishonesty of one of the parties, and a conscious harm done to the second client, in order to justify the overruling of the client’s obli- gation, to signify such carefulness that reflects the scope of agreement liability typical in a given case. Each of such behaviours could be defined as incongruent with bona fides. Such adjudications were to serve the protection against damage resulting from agreement making, providing honesty of the turnover via increasing the scope of liability and excluding the advantage of the one making an agreement conscious of doing harm to the client. The process of charging the seller with liability irrespective of his/her good or bad intentions if provided the buyer with defective goods the existence of which the buyer was not aware of has been traced since Justinian’s times. Taking into account the role of bona fides when evaluating a buying-selling agreement and principles concerning seller liability one can make a statement that bona fides played a Basic role in a Roman emptio — venditio agrement.
The contribution is devoted to the scientific review of works of Karol Rebro, Slovak law historian who was active in legal science in the period of the years 1934 – 2000. He wrote five monographs and three teaching texts from the area of Roman law and two monographs from Slovak history of law, which became subject of this analysis and were regarded as basic publications of their kind. It is clear from the contribution that Karol Rebro was a leading law theoretician in former Czechoslovakia and contributed to the conservation of Roman law in the study programmes of faculties of law and to its further development.
The submitted contribution focuses on the status of Roman law in the context of socialist jurisprudence. It tries to analyse various theories of Marxist ideologists and Romanists on the effectiveness and importance of the Roman law in socialist society, based on which it finds a characteristics of the relationship between Roman law and socialism. In this context the article also addresses the characteristics and goals of the socialist legal Romance as a specific school which had a tendency to separate itself from so-called „Bourgeois" schools examining Roman law.
The contribution evaluates the application of the Roman law principles of the trial to the current Slovak procedural codes – Civil Dispute and Civil Non-dispute Code. It focuses on finding out whether those principles have been taken into our regulations and, if so, in what form. It is an interesting probe into both – in the Roman procedural law and in the current form of the Slovak civil process, especially with regard to the fact, that Roman law sought justice, decency and morality in procedural and substantive law as well. What is currently the main interest of the Slovak court proceedings? Is it a searching for justice, or have other priorities prevailed? Even in creating these (relatively) new Codes, the traditional struggle of natural and positive law was fought. The article evaluates the outcome of this fight (quite critically).
The author gives an interpretation of mutatio ipso iure, i.e. endurance of proprietary right (usucapio). Subject to the fulfilment of conditions of endurance, tenure (possessio) will be transformed into the ownership (dominium). It is a transformation ipso iure resulting from the objective right, without human intervention. Therefore the author regards endurance as a kind of, (necessary change). The legal basis of mutatio is the will of the legislator to tolerate the transformation of tenure to ownership and it concerns each legal order, which has officially introduced the institute of endurance. The transformation of tenure to ownership eliminates the chaos in ownership relations and represents the effort at a successful legal expression.
Text discusses the Anonymus de rebus bellicis (DRB) - written in late 4th or early 5th century - proposals concerning the necessity to reform the ambiguity of law (DRB XXI). Author gathers opinions of modern scholars about the value, limits and influence of DRB XXI in the matter of so called codification of Roman law in Late Antiquity, adding to it his own interpretation of its text (with first Polish translation of the fragment by dr Anna Kotłowska, IH AMU Poznań). He deduces that DRB was the isolated petition of private citizen, and his ideas concerning the reform of leges and iura had no ties with project of Theodosian Code or other initiatives to order Roman law in the period. Author concludes that the main value of DRB XXI is the idea of improvement of law by emperor as a way to make better the internal state affairs, what was unfamiliar to contemporaries before writing of this treatise.
(Polish title: Walka panstwa rzymskiego z poganstwem i herezja w oczach poznoantycznych historykow: Filostorgiosa, Sokratesa, Sozomenosa, Teodoreta i Zosimosa). The article is a reflection on the politics of Roman Christian emperors against heretics and pagans, as presented in the Ecclesiastical Histories by Philostorgius, Socrates, Sozomenus and Theodoretus, as well as in the New History by Zosimus. The research is focused not only on similarities and differences in the approach towards this aspect in the enumerated works, but also on comparison of the picture revealed in the analysis with the one based on the Theodosian Code. As it is stated in the conclusion, the two pictures are not contradictory, though historians highlight only selected aspects of the process being described here. Sozomenus is the only one really interested in the impact of law on reality, while all of them contribute to our knowledge of law execution. Historians provide us with more valuable and reliable source when law in practice is included in their descriptions than when they deliberately try to convince the reader about a certain legal state.
In the first part of article, the author briefly explains the circumstances of origin of the law of property in the continental system of law on the background of the evolution of Roman private law. He refers to the role of glossators and commentators (so-called post-glossators) who during the historical development (13th to 15th centuries) tried to adapt Roman law to the new social and economic conditions by explaining the sources of Roman law. In these historical context a distinction between the law of obligation and the law of property started to be drawn, which clearly manifested itself during the reception of Roman law in continental European states. The category of the law of property, created by the legal science on the historical basis of Roman law during the long period of its reception, thus naturally found its legislative expression in private law of most states belonging to the continental system of law. The following part contains a comparison between the basic aspects of law of property provisions in a representative group of large civil codes adopted in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in French Code Civil, Austrian ABGB, German BGB, Swiss ZGB, Italian C.c.i. and Dutch BW. The comparison permitted to highlight, beside of several differences, general characteristics and principles, which are common to all these codes. The following principles of the law of property were highlighted: definiteness and absoluteness, prior tempore potior iure, numerus clausus and publicity of the law of property. These principles reflect the indispensability, cooperating function and stabilising character of the subsystem of the law of property in the private law codes in a market economy.
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