dag m i chal s e n 179 uring the 19th century the Roman Praetor was regarded by many European legal scientists as a model for legal production and administration.This is indeed rather surprising as the character of the ancient Roman praetorian way of making and applying law in many ways seemed to contradict the modern constitutionalism based upon the separation of powers.My main aim in this article is to show that the model of Praetor became a medium for reflections about what was perceived as problematic relationships between three new structures in 19th century society:The significance of constitutionalism, the growing importance of democratically elected national legislative assemblies and the impact of legal professionalization manifested in courts and legal science. In these debates there were ambiguous understandings of the concept of democracy as understood by many leading lawyers in relation to the issue of the task of lawmaking and legal adjudication. However, my aim is far from upholding an anachronistic critique of elite lawyers favouring a minimalist democracy with the usual arguments about the lawyers’ monopoly on legal competence. One has to take into account the constitutional-administrative organization of the liberal 19th century state in which law and politics were structured differently than today.Also, the impact of new popular assemblies and the separation of powers were not quite absorbed as to the production of law. All in all, there were – as always – contradictions in the political, scientific and legal perceptions of law which were highlighted in the discourses on the Roman Praetor. The Modernity of the Roman Praetor in the 19th Century European Legal Science D
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