Education and Research in Roman Lawand Legal History 277 duced from history. It concerns the comprehension of one’s owns relativity and leads to some basic humility. It keeps the modern jurist fromassessing his own legal systemand his own ideas about it as absolute and undisputable. Secondly, since our legal systemrests upon certain fundamental and collective ethic and social concepts, an overviewof the historical growth of the lawis one excellent way of allowing the students to discover these concepts throughout history. The students can in this way be made conscious of the long historic process that was needed to attain our present day standards. Therefore professors of Roman law and legal history should not recoil fromcomparisons with the present, and in a time where the knowledge of history has severely debased, even fromtime to time froma more teleological approach. Roman law, which survival as an academic discipline is much more at stake than that of legal history in general, offers a good example of how all this could be implemented. The study of Roman lawby all lawstudents can and must be defended. Moreover, in viewof the many research opportunities a philological approach of the Roman law still holds, it should become an obligatory course for classical philologists. According to the traditional view on the teaching of Roman law at law schools, the lecture consists of a rather factual description of the rules of Roman private lawand procedure. At the most, some internal evolution in the Roman law under the Republic and the Empire is stressed. The lecture is considered as a propedeusis to the study of the modern Belgian law system. The students are supposed to get introduced into a coherent, ancient lawsystemas they will be into the actual lawsystem. Furthermore, Roman lawis the source of many juridical concepts that are still valid or relevant. In my viewthis approach, though valuable and classic, is too limited and negleets some opportunities Roman law should offer. On the one hand, it is too static and non-historical. On the other hand, it is too abstract to make the lecture a useful preparation on lectures into modern law. By this approach, the historical reality of Roman law and Roman civilisation is neglected. Thereby, the opportunity to show the students the very clear and distinct phases in the development of the Roman legal system, parallel with the development of its society, is wasted. In this way one might say the approach ressembles the one of the glossators, but since the Roman lawis of much less practical value nowadays as it was in the 12th century, the approach becomes very abstract for the students. It is mostly left to the students themselves to make any comparisons and seak for elements of Roman lawstill relevant nowadays. Legal history can only teach lessons for the present if it is firstly considered to be history, id est as a result of different determinating factors in a complex social surrounding of a certain period at a certain time, and not as a static, autonomous system, brilliant though it might be. Any attempt to make the study of history relevant for 19
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