observed outside of its territory for comity and equity.” Thus, for him there is no obligation to observe such law: it happens often, but it need not happen. The section itself, making the point even clearer, reads: “And so, sometimes, when a neighboring people wishes to observe the customs of a neighbor out of comity, and lest many mattters properly accomplished be thrown into confusion, on account of custom statutes migrate beyond the territory of the law maker, when their effect has been examined.” Thus, for Voet, it does not always happen that the relevant foreign law is recognized: when it does, it happens only after an examination of the effect of the foreign statute. There is no legal obligation to put the neighboring law into effect. For Voet, in contrast to Huber, courts have discretion. Other passages from the same work confirm this interpretation of Paulus Voet’s use of comiter. From an early date Scots studied law in continental Europe.150 The War of Independence at the beginning of the fourteenth century closed Oxford and Cambridge to the Scots, and there were no Scottish universities until the fifteenth century. For a time, after its foundation in, the University of Louvain, for instance, was a powerful draw. The Scottish law faculties, once established, languished, and the tradition of going abroad to study continued: mainly to France until the s, and thereafter primarily to the Dutch Republic. Statistics are III 150 See above all, R. Feenstra, ‘Scottish-Dutch Legal Relations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,’ in Scotland and Europe, 1200-1850, ed. T.C. Smout (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 128ff., and the authorities he cites; Paul Nève, ‘Disputationesof Scots Students Attending University in the Northern Netherlands,’ in Acts of the British Legal History Conference (1989), ed. W.M. Gordon and T.D. Fergus (London, 1991), pp. 95ff.; J.W. Cairns, ‘William Crosse, Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Glasgow, 1746-1649; A Failure of Enlightened Patronage,’ in Acts of the British Legal History Conference (1991), ed. P. Birks (London, 1992).
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