Ken Pennington

This essay surveys one of medieval jurisprudence’s most
important contributions to modern ideas about how court procedure should be conducted and how the rights of defendants should be protected during a trial. European civil courts adopted these rules much earlier than English and American common law courts. The medieval heritage had its flaws. The most significant was the use of torture in the courts. The essay also describes with how torture was introduced into the courtroom and what limitations the jurists placed on it.

The first letter in Pope Innocent III's register of his second year was Vergentis in senium, a letter which he sent to the city of Viterbo in March, 1199. The decretal reflected Innocent's growing concern with heresy in the papal states and established new and more stringent penalties for those who rejected or subverted the Christian faith. In Vergentis, perhaps following the Roman lawyer Placentinus, Innocent imposed the traditional spiritual punishment of excommunication on heretics, equated heresy with lese majesty, and applied to convicted heretics the sanctions for treason in Roman law: complete confiscation of goods, even disinheriting innocent children. The punishment was fitting, Innocent observed, because a heretic injured celestial majesty, a crime far more heinous than any offense committed against temporal authority. Since the heretics in Viterbo continued to demand his attention later in his pontificate, we do not know how effective Innocent's decree was, bu...

As a defender of the Indians and an opponent of the methods used by the Spanish conquistadors, Bartolomé de Las Casas was as controversial a figure in the sixteenth century as he has been in the last four hundred years of historiography. Las Casas' fight to preserve the freedom of the Indians has gained for him not only devoted admirers, but also angry detractors.1Las Casas was not the only Spaniard who defended the Indians, but his efforts are the best known. He labored for fifty years before death finally halted the steady flow of polemics from his pen. However, he was not just a sheltered academician like Vitoria, but he actively championed the rights of the Indians by working and living among them in the New World.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres Ivo of Chartres was one of the most learned scholars of his time, a powerful bishop and a major figure in the so-called 'Investiture Contest'. Christof rolker here offers a major new study of ...

In incorporation of the canons of the Fourth Lateran into its own collection and later into Compilatio quarta; examines the manuscript evidence with which the evolution of the collection can be traced.  Discusses the changes in procedure codified by the Council and the precedents in papal decretals for the language of the texs

Isidore of Seville (†636) formulated a remarkable list of natural rights in his Etymologiae; some which do not seem to have had any precedents in Roman culture and law. Isidore defined property as the natural right of all human beings to hold all property in common. His definition of natural property rights and all human beings right to live free echoed in European jurisprudence for over a millennium.

Rights may be the most important legal attribute people possess in society. Language, however, is crucial for shaping the way in which people understand words, and those words shape their thought. This reality is strikingly true in the Englishspeaking world when discussing the word "law." In English, jurists understand "law" as being separate from rights. There is no linguistic connection between rights and law. Consequently, in American and English common law systems, people's rights must have their origins in positive laws promulgated by legislatures, decided in court cases, or, in the modern era, embedded in constitutions or treaties.1 Ancient Roman law and the legal systems whose foundations are anchored on its jurisprudence could find personal rights in norms that transcended positive law.

Christof Rolker has written the most exciting book on pre-Gratian canonical collections since Klaus Zechiel-Eckes published his studies on Pseudo-Isidore. The received wisdom on Ivo of Chartres was that he compiled three canonical collections: the Tripartita, Decretum, and the Panormia, which is an abbreviated version of Ivo's Decretum. Thanks to the efforts of Martin Brett, Bruce Brasington, and others, all three collections can now be used in preliminary editions on the web at http://knowledgeforge.net/ivo/. Scholarly opinions varied greatly about whether all three collections should be attributed to Ivo. The issue is important because scholarly opinion also has been convinced that Gratian used the Tripartita and the Panormia when he compiled his Decretum. If this were true, it would mean that Ivo of Chartres' methodology had a profound influence on the Father of Canon Law. Rolker's book began as a dissertation directed under the firm hand of Martin Brett, who has been the driving force in Ivonian studies. Rolker devised a very clever strategy to solve the questions of authorship. He reasoned that if Ivo had been the author of all three collections, he would have used them in his letters in which he was accustomed to cite canonical texts. With that working hypothesis, Rolker went to work. His results were stunning. The only collection that Ivo used in his letters was the Decretum. He did not use the Tripartita nor the Panormia. The conclusion is inexorably clear: although Ivo used a version of the Tripartita for his Decretum and although the Parnomia was dependent on his Decretum, since he cited neither collection in his letters, he could not be their author. Rolker has brilliantly solved a puzzle that has perplexed scholars for over a century.