Salem and Bizance

The study of law or jurisprudence, according to one of the earliest definitions recorded in the Digest, is ‘the knowledge of things divine and human, and the science of what is just or unjust’. ¹ Equivalent definitions elaborated legal study as ‘true philosophy’ and as the ‘art of the good and the equal’. ² Law, in other words, was never a merely temporal or secular study, nor was the substance of law ever to be conceived as divorced from its spiritual essence. The positive forms of law, in short, were inevitably and inexorably bound to the methods of an art and the criteria of justice and truth. The Renaissance reception of Roman law reiterated a classical tradition which consistently subordinated municipal or local rules to the image of a universal and theocratic source of law. The order of legal method was thus one which for obvious reasons gave priority to the divine origins of law and ordered the means of temporal justice according to a hierarchy of differing titles of legality. It was not simply that the art of law aspired to wisdom, but rather that the discipline and practice of legal judgment were predicated upon a series of higher orders of knowledge. Even in a late sixteenth-century primer or preparative to legal study, the depiction of law as embedded in the concerns of justice dictated that the law student be familiar with the substance of legal rules only after acquiring a knowledge of and respect for those disciplines which came in advance of law, namely, the rules of divinity, nature, moral philosophy, logic and grammar. ³