Law Commons^™

From Legal Transplants To Legal Formats, Alan Watson

Scholarly Works

Most of the time rulers and governments in the Western world as a whole were little interested in making private law. Instead, the task devolved upon some group of the legal elite who became in effect subordinate law makers without having been given power to make law. Thus, Roman jurists as such were private individuals with no ties to government: they made law when their opinions came to win approval from other jurists. English judges in the Middle-Ages and later were appointed to decide cases: the tradition long was that they found the law but did not make it. Continental …