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alain wijffels around 1800 have not proven as resilient as their authors expected. Admittedly, the heritage of that era – whether through institutions, constitutions, codification, or even many general principles and rules of law, is often still present in our legal systems, but in most cases fundamentally altered by new ramifications which no longer follow the rationalist ideal of general coherence which was meant to be a hallmark of the Vernunftrecht and its implementation in an integrated institutional system and codifications.30 The jurisdictional complexity which has re-emerged during the past two centuries is not the same as that which prevailed during the Ancien Régime – just as the re-emergence of competing political actors at the expense of exclusive sovereignty is not a re-appearance of the Late-Medieval political concurrent political actors. The similarity lies in the diversity of courts which develop in order to adjudicate on rules linked to a particular corporate status, aimed at governing special-interest groups. The diversity of special-interest courts, especially when different networks of tribunals are capped by different appellate and supreme courts, creates a courts’ system which has no central apex, and where there is therefore no homogenous hierarchy of peripheries. In Western Europe, the ideal of public governance has been traditionally closely associated with Justice. The association appears prominently in the history of art. One of the most famous medieval examples is the fourteenth-century fresco of the Allegoria del buon governo by Lorenzetti, in the town hall of Siena.31 In the main fresco, Justice appears twice, fram30 Wijffels, Alain 2009 pp. 49-62. 31 Among the many studies in the history of art and political theory which analyse Lorenzetti’s work, see Boucheron, Patrick 2013. For a systematic synthesis of the main readings which scholars have proposed, see Riklin, Alois 1996; Rubinstein, Nicolai 1958 pp. 179207; Skinner, Quentin:2002 pp. 39-117. New readings based on recent archaeological and scientific analysis of the fresco are incorporated in Dessì, Rosa Maria 2012 pp. 89-146. The buon governo fresco has some good reproductions offered on various internet sites. In 45 Today’s Judiciaries: a peripheral ‘state power’ at odds with the principle of democracy?

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