F. Calasso’s concept of ius commune, the Romanist tradition, and the problem of historical representation

Abstract

On 16th January 1933 the young Francesco Calasso (1904-1965) delivered a prolusion on a subject that was to take the new generation of legal historians by storm: “The concept of the ius commune”. His prolusion not only changed the image of the legal past but also gave a new impetus to legal history placing it at the heart of legal science. Today we need to go back in time and look closely at what he said, because the ius commune, which in the following decades became a major key to understanding the legal past, is now unclear.

Keywords

• ius commune
• Pandectism
• representation
• Romanist tradition
• history theory