Legal Humanism: Principles and Historical Impact

Context of Legal Humanism

On a philosophical level, legal humanism stems from the contrast between medieval scholasticism, subject to the authority of tradition but also attentive to existing reality, and Renaissance Neoplatonism, which believed in the free and unlimited power of reason and was attracted by pure ideal forms.

In legal terms, the humanistic orientation was facilitated by the gradual rise of national legal systems, which freed the study of Roman law from practical objectives and transformed it into a historical and literary activity, increasingly similar to the task of the antiquarian.

Socially, humanist criticism of earlier legal discourse and its proponents, traditional jurists, was fueled by widespread social antipathy towards the figure of the counsel lawyer, seen as pedantic and rigid, who cultivated a formal and convoluted style.

Key Guidelines Proposed

• a) A historical-philological purification of Roman legal texts, for deliverance from the yoke of medieval glosses and commentaries, and, secondly, from the corrections made by Justinian compilers to the classical texts. This plan assumed the combination of legal study with historical study as a way to regain the original context of the Roman legal texts and their original meaning. This resulted in a series of critical editions of legal texts.
• b) A systematic attempt to build law, philosophically inspired by Platonic idealism, seeking to remake a legendary work of Cicero, De iure civili in artem redigendo, in which Roman law could be developed in a systematic way. This approach led to a critique of the unmethodical and analytical character of the legal skills of the Commentators, and gave rise to methodical expositions of law, at both Roman and national levels.
• c) A reform of legal education, focusing on the text of the law and fostering a synthetic and systematizing spirit among lawyers, which represented a critique of the doctrinal and analytical trend of education in traditional universities.
• d) A new attention to natural law of a rational and systematic character. Humanists were also influenced by the Roman natural law tradition. They claimed that the cultivated lawyer, trained in a solid philosophy, would understand that the "nature of justice is not to change according to the will of men but to conform with natural law." Their greater originality was shown in their critique of Justinian Roman law, in favor of an alleged classical Roman law. In the sixteenth century, a second recreation of Roman law began (the first was that of the Commentators), now imbued with rationality.