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central and peripheral courts or concentration of political powers of their era. That approach may be illustrated through three distinct epochs of our legal history: (i) The challenge of early-modern courts to the paradigm of exclusive sovereignty; (ii) Modern courts: the paradigm of exclusive sovereignty subverted; and (iii) Today’s Judiciaries: a peripheral “state power” at odds with the principle of democracy? Medieval legal pluralism(i.e. the diversity of legal laws based on territory, personal status, the nature of property etc.) was strengthened by a corresponding jurisdictional pluralism. Most interest groups which could avail themselves on a particular legal status and regime also benefited from a privilegium fori. Local and regional customs, for example, were in the first place implemented by a specific local or regional court. During the early-modern period, political actors were neutralised or subordinated by the actor who succeeded in concentrating exclusive sovereignty in his hands. One would therefore expect that this political actor would also have controlled (if he had not abolished) the courts of the former concurrent actors in the polity. However, although the earlymodern sovereign did establish or develop his own system of courts, these usually did not acquire a judicial monopoly within the polity: hence the characteristic “patchwork” of courts during the Ancien Régime, reflecting successive layers of interest groups which retained to some extent their particular laws, but also their particular courts – even if, nominally or effectively, those courts could be subordinated to the supreme judicial authority of the sovereign. France is a good example. It was, after all, in many ways the model of the polity where the new paradigm of exclusive sovereignty of the King had triumphed: by the sixteenth century, the King of France had eliminated competing political rulers within the realm, and was emancipated fromany rulers whomight pretend to exercise universal authority, whether emperor or pope.11 Throughout his kingdom, a hierarchy of royal 38 The challenge of early-modern courts to the paradigm of exclusive sovereignty

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