International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.3, 2024

Understanding Law and Governance: Lawyers, Law Courts, and Litigants in Early Modern Europe

(Abstract)

Michael P. Breen

This article re-examines the role of legal professionals in bringing about the so-called “Legal Revolution” of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Building on recent scholarship analyzing the ubiquity and banality of litigation and uses of the law by premodern Europeans, the author concurs with other scholars who conclude that legal practitioners (barristers, solicitors, notaries, and others) did less to promote the use of formal legal institutions and procedures than previously believed. Instead, we should understand the expansion of legal institutions and the growth of formal law as a process driven by the interests and activities of ordinary men and women who appropriated the law to organize and manage their familial, social, and economic lives. Paradoxically, the pluralistic character of early modern law, with its conflicting and overlapping networks of tribunals and legal authorities, along with the limited coercive power wielded by most tribunals, made law more attractive to parties, who incorporated its resources into a wider array of dispute resolution and conflict management strategies. Nevertheless, this article contends, lawyers did play a crucial role in promoting “legal consciousness” and a culture of legality. They did so, however, less as courtroom advisers and legal representatives, and more through new forms of legal publications that invited a wider public to debate and judge the quality of justice administered by official law courts and the trained legal professionals who staffed them.