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Javier MARTINEZ-TORRON, Anglo-American Law and Canon Law: Canonical Roots of the Common Law Tradition, preface by Richard H. HELMHOLZ, Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History, Bd. 18, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1998, xii, 195 p. -- ISBN 3-428-09414-X -- 92 DM; 83,50 FS; 672 OS.
This is the 18[Symbol Not Transcribed]th volume in a series of comparative studies in continental and Anglo-American legal history. Even though a German publishing house inaugurated the series in 1985, all but four of the works are in English. They range over many areas of law and time periods, for example: The Courts and the Development of Commercial Law; The Trial Jury in England, France, Germany, 1700-1900; The Records of the Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts; Towards a General Law of Contract; Canon Law in Protestant Lands; The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World, 1820-1920; Case Law in the Making: The Techniques and Methods of Judicial Records and Law Reports.
Tha A., a young civil law professor at Complutense University (Madrid), carried out his research at the Universities of Cambridge and Chicago where he joined the law faculties in a temporary and honorary capacity. The book first appeared in Spanish at the end of 1991 and has been largely unaltered in the present English-language edition. He seeks to demonstrate "how significantly canon law contributed to forming the Anglo-American legal tradition." Canon law, to be sure, in the later Middle Ages was closely joined to the Roman law giving rise to the "medieval ius commune which then dominated the legal world on the European continent" (p. 1). Since "the ecclesiastical sources were primarily responsible for the inflow of continental legal notions into the British Isles during the Middle Ages," canon law is the focus of this study (p. 2). As Richard H. Helmholz observes in the preface, "the author is able to approach the subject with a more thorough grounding in Continental law than is possible for most English legal historians. He finds parallels, connections, and distinctions that are harder for those whose education has been in the history of the common law to see" (p. ix).
The...