RS 19

30 BartoloméClavero subdue it. As jurists, they were practical. They exerted themselves to exploit to the utmost the less legalist trace of the Code, that is to say, its acknowledgment of some Derechos forales, a set of customs prevailing over the Law itself. The custom started receiving a treatment, which was empirical and theoretical at the same time, as a way of proving the existence and affirming the value of some principles and possibilities of liberty, of an effective legal order with this other inspiration. At the end of nineteenth century and early twentieth century there was in Spain a very remarkable development of a sociology of the customary Lawon behalf of a practice of liberty.*^ This is a true nativism, a search of the Law in the deepest interiors of several Spanish territories, in the field of some Pyrenean customs, either Basque, or Navarre, or Aragonese, or Catalan, of some agrarian usages of these and other places, of some maritime practices not only Northern, of some quite scattered communitarian styles, etc. For any exterior observer all this might seem a greater enclosure than that of the codified Law, which, after all, despite its national conception, had an European inspiration. Such is not the case. It does not mean a simple empirical operation. This nativism amounts to more than local compilations of traditions and customs. The harvest is the sowing. It has been started with an idea that infuses life, the idea that such a customary Lawrepresents a world of liberties. They are so understood and, most of all, so treated. The nativists build doctrinally their subject. They present such a project elaborated as expression and testimony of an effective, not only virtual, regime of social, as well as individual, liberties. So was the case. There is something else, which might be of more interest. The primordial notion that the Law is not national, not only because the custom is not, but also, and above all, because there exists a basic and fundamental Law, originally of the individual and extensively of the society, with no qualification whatsoever, not even national; this notion, that I call primordial, has not disappeared after the Code, at the end of the century. It has been accentuated even in this sector most opposed to the codification; and because of the value that has been given to the custom, it is not understood that this is opposed to nativism. 5, Transnational blockade If the most nativist written works are reviewed, a cosmopolitan concern will be detected. It is not realized that Spain, with all its customary Law, with its correlative contention towards the politically decided Law, with its subsequent political pluralism, can be a peculiar and unique case, quite the reverse, it can * Rafael Altamira, Le droit coutumier espagnol moderne, in Recueil d’Etudes sur les Sources du Droit en I’Honneur de Francois Gény, Paris s. d. (1934), II, pp. 269-276.

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