an inexhaustible source of information for legal history Privatrechtsgeschichte.14 An initial project coordinated by Alain Wijffels aimed to compare published decisions with court records to verify the reliability of the information provided in the printed compendia and, more broadly, to gauge how the compilers had worked and their selection criteria?15 How did they summarize the decisions and what audience did they have in mind? Following on from this, Hamilton Bryson and I initiated a research project on the principle of ratio decidendi.16 It should not be forgotten that in the late mediaeval and early modern period, judges – at least in the civil law system – did not disclose the rationes decidendi. Many authors and editors have promoted their printed collections of decisions by claiming they disclosed, or at least reconstructed, the rationes decidendi of the major court decisions. On a related note, there was also the project coordinated by Albrecht Cordes on the comparative history of jurists’ argumentation techniques.17 Another recent research focus has been the history of procedural law in the European central courts focuses. Civil procedure is now understood to have been more than a set of formal rules and binding principles underlying a court’s judicial activities; it was also a set of techniques to facilitate conflict resolution. By favouring judicial methods or, in a different approach, extra- or infra-judicial modes of conflict resolution such as arbitration, conciliation, mediation, or court-approved agreements, the legislator and courts not only modulated the methods of dispute resolution when they issued or implemented procedural rules, but also chose whether to submit the resolution of certain disputes, such as commercial matters, to the control of the state courts. These issues have been the subject of several research programmes, some using a compa14 Helmut Coing, Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, 3 vols (Munich: Beck, 1973–1988). 15 Alain Wijffels (ed.), Case-Law in the Making: The Techniques and Methods of Judicial Law Records and Reports, 2 vols (Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History, 17/1–2; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997). 16 W. Hamilton Bryson & Serge Dauchy (eds.), Ratio decidendi: Guiding principles of judicial decisions, i:Case Law, and ii: ‘Foreign’ Law, 2 vols (Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History, 25/1–2; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006–2010). 17 Albrecht Cordes (ed.), Juristische Argumentation: Argumente der Juristen(Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, 49; Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). 91
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