part v • comparative legal history • reinhard zimmermann 234 This entails tracing continuity as much as change, diversity as much as similarity. When I wrote The Law of Obligations, I did so as a legal historian interested in charting the tradition established by, and on the basis of, the Roman legal sources.3 That tradition eventually disintegrated into themodern systems of private law. Today I am working as a comparative lawyer using legal history as a key to understanding the legal landscape of our modern private law.4 If history involves comparison, for me comparison also involves history. My experience has always been that the historical approach is essential for a critical appraisal of the modern legal systems with which I am familiar and of their relationship with one another, for appreciating their specific contours, and for assessing their place within what Harold J. Berman has called a ‘Western’ legal tradition.5 The historical approach thus naturally blends with the comparative approach. I have also found that looking at legal rules in a historical and comparative perspective is invaluable as a teaching method, for it inspires students not only to broaden their intellectual horizons, but also to reflect upon, rather than merely to learn and uncritically accept, the legal rules of their own legal system. Let me therefore offer two fairly arbitrarily chosen illustrations, followed by some general observations. In his Decisiones Sacri Regni Neapolitani Consilii, first published in 1499, Matthaeus de Afflictis reports the following case.6 A husband quietly entered the room in which his dying wife was about to make her will. He kissed and flattered her until she included a legacy for him of immovable 3 Reinhard Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition (revised edn, Oxford: OUP, 1996). 4 See, for example, Roman Law, Contemporary Law, European Law: The Civilian Tradition Today (Oxford: OUP, 2001); see also James Gordley, ‘Comparative Law and Legal History’, in Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law(paperback edn, Oxford: OUP, 2008) 753–73. 5 Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition(1983). For the concept of legal tradition, see Patrick Glenn, Legal Traditions of theWorld(4th edn, Oxford: OUP, 2010). 6 Decisiones Sacri Regni Neapolitani Consilii (Frankfurt, 1600) Dec LXIX. Exempla docent
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