ARTICLE: Marie SEONG-HAK KIM, "Civil Law and Civil War: Michel de L'Hôpital and the Ideals of Legal Unification in Sixteenth-Century France" (Law & History Review XXVIII (2010), No. 3, 791-826) (OPEN ACCESS)

(image source: CUP)

First paragraph:

François Hotman quipped that a jurist trained solely in Roman law would feel, upon finding himself in a French court, as if he had landed among the savages of the new world.1 The image of Hotman’s hapless jurist captures a conundrum widespread in early modern France, which the late French historian Michel Reulos dubbed “la quaestio vexata of the sixteenth century”: judges and lawyers in France studied Roman law at the universities but had to plead according to customary law once they started practicing...

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