ABSTRACT
The approach of the Romanists to private law is particularly rational and structured compared with the thinking of English lawyers. This chapter examines this rationality in more depth not just for European harmonisation purposes, but equally for property thinking - and rights thinking - in general. One of the fundamental distinctions in the structural make-up of the codes is the dichotomy between property and obligations. Owning is to be sharply distinguished from owing. The chapter shows that the same complexity is to be found in the civil law. The history of property notions in the Romanist systems might seem like a progression from the descriptive to the axiomatic passing through the inductive and the deductive respectively. It was the medieval lawyers, in particular the Post-glossators, who constructed the framework upon which modern legal and political theory in Continental Europe is based.
