ABSTRACT
The starting point for this model is the legal institution. The notion of a legal institution is central to legal science on the continent and it is a notion that has its roots in Roman law. In civilian legal thought, a legal institution is regarded as a social reality around which rules are framed;32 and in Roman law there were three such institutions – persons (personae), things (res) and actions (actiones).33 What this in effect means, as we have seen (Chapter 1), is that all legal rules attach themselves to a person, to a thing or to a legal remedy. However, these institutions are not just legal concepts; they represent the meeting place between social fact and legal rationality and, consequently, they have a role not only in organising the law but also in organising the facts themselves (cf Chapter 2 § 5). They are the means by which a raw set of facts is transformed into a legal scenario capable of receiving the application of a legal rule; and, in turn, the scenario plus rule can perhaps act as a precedent. Legal institutions are thus fundamental both to problem-solving and to legal reasoning. They are the vehicle both by which facts are categorised so that the law can be applied and by which the law itself is structured so as to render it capable of being applied in the first place.34
