Page 212 - Latent Defect or Excessive Price?Exploring Early Modern Legal Approach to Remedying Defects in Goods Exchanged for Money - Bruijn
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LEGAL HUMANISM
4.5 Summary and concluding remarks
The present chapter explored the influence of humanist tendencies in legal scholarship on the approach of legal scholars to sales in which the thing sold happened to be suffering from a defect. Legal humanists observed that medieval scholarship had not managed to bring clarity on all fronts about the intricate rules in the Corpus iuris civilis. With the help of new tools supplied by renaissance learning - manuscript reading, Greek, and History - legal humanists envisaged to reinterpret the ius commune law governing defects in the thing sold and to solve its complexities. Not infrequently did they use arguments based on presumed historical facts which surround the Corpus iuris civilis. In this respect, the line of reasoning of legal humanists markedly differed from the way medieval legal scholars interpreted the body of Justinianic Roman law. The latter considered the Corpus iuris civilis as a product of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, not as a compilation of texts taken from earlier ages which all had come into existence within their own particular context (4.1).
Though the humanist scholars discussed in this chapter lived and worked in the same age as the Castilian scholars studied in the preceding chapter, their approach to law resembled more the medieval tradition of learned law than the Castilian scholastically inspired mindset. Humanist legal scholars by and large found the similar points of law concerning defects in the thing as problematic as their medieval predecessors had done.
Similar to medieval ius commune scholars, humanists were puzzled by the presence of two sets of remedies, aedilician and civil, for defects in the thing in Justinian's Corpus iuris civilis (4.2.1). They consequently put much work into explaining why both sets were present in Roman law which they considered as written reason (ratio scripta). Yet, the work done by their medieval colleagues and their rich endowment with intellectual tools enabled the humanists to penetrate more deeply into the supposed underlying reasons of Justinian to bring various remedies for defects in the thing sold in his compilation. Frequently, the historical genesis of the aedilician remedies in pre-Justinianic times played an important role in the humanist interpretations. As a result, legal humanist did not agree on all differences between the aedilician and civil remedies for defects in the thing which, according to medieval jurists, justified their existence as separate legal remedies.
Regarding the scope of the civil and aedilician remedies, all humanist scholars studied in this book reached the medieval conclusion that the aedilician remedy for returning the thing sold only applied to cases in which the thing suffered from a corporeal defect (4.2.1.1). Wesenbeck and Doneau even seemed to go further and also ruled out the aedilician remedy for price reduction in the event of non-corporeal defects. A strict historical reading of the edict induced them to adopt that view.
However, in the debate about the aedilician and civil remedies' reduction of price, the views among legal humanists diverged (4.2.1.2). According to medieval ius commune, all remedies came with their own method to calculate how much the seller had to deduct from the paid price. One group of scholars headed by Oldendorp and Wesenbeck held on to this Accursian distinction between the aedilician calculation which took the thingĀ“s
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