alain wijffels peror’s reforms on various issues. For the Belgian conservative interest groups, it was only a temporary triumph: merely ten years later, when Belgium was annexed by the revolutionary French republic, the latter’s pyramidal system was introduced and imposed on the Belgian population. The French system looked very similar, in its rationalist design, to what Joseph II had intended to introduce, only now the supreme court was in Paris, no longer within the former Belgian territories.27 The French system was also introduced in other territories conquered by the French armies, or in its satellite states, and ultimately also in countries which had managed to escape French rule, but which after Napoleon’s defeat nevertheless sought to modernise their state system, including their system of courts. From the start, the establishment of a uniform system of courts raised objections. Some differentiations could not be overcome through universal rationalist principles, nor through revolutionary ideology. Thus, different proceedings, largely before different courts, seemed necessary for the age-old distinction between civil and criminal cases. In the area of private law, a justification was often acknowledged for a separate set of courts dealing with merchants in commercial cases, and following their own proceedings. Since the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury reforms, the ordinary courts’ system has undergone a further diversification, including typically, for example, industrial courts and family courts. Whenever that diversification takes place within the original pyramidal structure, a degree of uniformity and homogeneity is maintained. The diversification usually takes place at the level of first-instance courts, tories of the Austrian Hapsburgs. See in general Fink, Humbert 1993; Beales, Derek 1987 and 2008. In Italy, where the Leopoldina and the reform of criminal justice have been extensively researched, see a. o. Ricci, Francesco (ed.) 1999. 27 Heirbaut, Dirk 2008 pp. 159-192. 43 Modern courts: the paradigm of exclusive sovereignty subverted
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=