Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/73

 2. JENKS: TEUTONIC LAW 59 at a similar process. The Landrechte which appear in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Austrian Landrecht (dating so far back as 1292), the Bavarian Landrecht of 1346, the almost contemporary Silesian Landrecht, are little more than official editions of the Suabian Mirror and the Saxon Mirror. But the inherent weakness of German legal developement gives rise at this point to the greatest tragedy in the history of Teutonic Law. Overcome by the evils of Partikularismus, dazzled by the false glai"e of the semi-Roman Kaisership, drugged by the fatal influence of the Italian connection, German Law ceases to develope on its own lines, and submits to the invasion of the Roman Law. This time it is not the Code of Theodosius which wins the victory ; but that masterpiece of Roman state-craft, the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian, which the Glossators and Commentators of Italy have expanded into a marvellous system of scholastic law. Through the universities, through the writers and teachers, through the learned Doctors who fill the courts of Germany, the Roman Law becomes the Common Law of the / German Empire. Even feudal law, for which, of course, there is no provision in the work of Justinian, catches the impulse ; and the " Feud Books " of Milan are received in Germany proper as the Decima Collatio Novellarum, that is, as the legislation of Roman Emperors. The process is going on during the whole of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; but the crowning point is the establishment, in the year 1495, of the Reichskammergericht, or supreme court of the German Empire, of whose judges at first half, afterwards all, are to be Doctors of the Civil Law. That Roman Law should revive in southern France, in Italy, in Spain, where the provincials had once stood thick as the standing corn, seems natural, and, perhaps, inevitable ; that it should invade the very home of Teutonism is nothing less than a tragedy. Thus did Rome"^ conquer Germany, a thousand years after the Roman Empire I had ceased to be.^ We must also remember that Roman Law / effected a similar triumph in distant Scotland. ' See the process described by Brunner, in Holtzendorff's Encyklo- pddie, Part I. pp. 291-294, and Schroder, Deutsche Bechtsgeschichte, pp. 722-731.