Friday, March 2, 2018

Great Christian Jurists: Spain and France

Cambridge University Press is publishing a series, "Great Christian Jurists" that "comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied."

Rafael Domingo, Emory University School of Law and University of Navarra has posted contributions to two of these volumes.  The first is his and Javier Martínez-Torrón’s introduction to Great Christian Jurists in Spanish History (Cambridge University Press, April 2018 ):
Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

The second is his and Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet’s Paul Fournier (1853-1935), a chapter in the forthcoming Great Christian Jurists in French History, edited by Olivier Descamps and Rafael Domingo (Cambridge University Press, 2019):
A leading figure and restorer of the history of canon law in France, Paul Fournier became in his lifetime and remains today a worldwide distinguished historian of medieval canon law. Many of his writings, especially those dealing with medieval ecclesiastical courts and those referring to canonical collections, have held up under the scrutiny of time. His academic footprint has continued through the work of great students and students of students, such as Gabriel Le Bras and Jean Gaudemet. As a supporting actor in the religious events related to the French Third Republic, Fournier was able to accommodate his traditional Catholicism to the new social trends and to sow peace in a turbulent moment in the relations between the Church and the French State. The influence he exercised over the general ideas of his time, both in the legal field and in philosophical and moral terms, cannot be minimized. Men like Fournier enabled the Church to reconcile itself with the state and with science.