Foreword: Peter Stein, Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge, 1968-1993
Bracton got his Roman law from the Glossators, Hale from the Humanists and Austin from the Pandectists. In each case the English writer was affected by the form and tendency of his source.
Bracton found a legal grammar with which he was able to build up a picture of English law in substantive rather than procedural terms. Hale found an account of the parallel development of law and society from a primitive to a sophisticated system. Austin found the categories and tools of analysis with which to test the scientific quality of the law against an external standard.This passage from his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Civil Law in Cambridge, Roman Law and English Jurisprudence Yesterday and Today (Cambridge, 1969), witnesses to the depth and range of Peter Stein’s scholarship. He has made major contributions to jurisprudence and its history, and he is a master of the western European legal tradition and its Roman foundation.
His writings have ranged across the whole field of the Roman legal tradition: the substantive Roman law and its reflection in modem legal systems, both Common law and civilian, from Scotland to San Marino; the resurgence of Roman law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and legal humanism in the sixteenth; the basic forms of legal reasoning and modes of legal analysis; Roman legal ideas and their pervasive influence on political philosophy.
Few scholars command more affection and admiration, and few have done more to illuminate not only Roman law as it was in its first life but also the huge contribution of the Roman law library to both the principal legal families in modem Europe. His long and immensely fruitful tenure of the Cambridge chair has also brought many to depend on his permanent availability as a leader and defender of a particular view of the law and legal education, as requiring, indispensably, an historical foundation.
PETER BIRKS
Regius Professor of Civil Law, University of Oxford
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