Medieval Legal Thought and Interpretation of Roman Law
2. Discourse Structure
All updating and systematization of law should be enforced under an interpretation of Roman-Justinian law. Medieval legal thought tended to identify the right with the legislature’s intention. Reading Romance texts and observing the political life of the time promoted a statist conception of law, which held that the king had an absolute monopoly of issuance.
The reality of a legal system was based on standards rooted in a tradition of great authority. Lawyers, using legal texts, undertook the task of adapting legal regulation to the new social reality.
Thus, the objectives of legal knowledge coincided with interpretation, which sought to discover the legal significance and rationale of laws.
Interpretation tended to become discovery, the uncovering of key legal principles in practice and culture of the time. This work aimed to reveal the legislator’s unspoken intentions through appropriate logical-dialectical means.
2.1. The Opposition of the “Spirit” to the “Letter” of the Law
The first path to innovative interpretation was contrasting the text’s spirit with its letter, giving decisive value to the spirit. This distinction stemmed from fundamental principles of medieval philosophy of language. Attributing decisive value to the spirit of the law is found in both Pauline teachings and the precepts of the Digest.
This procedure is justified only when the available interpretive system faces difficulties in resolving textual contradictions with the regulatory interests of interpreters. This occurs when the interpreter formulates a rule that cannot be fully accepted, stating that it exceeds the legislator’s rational will. The rule is then interpreted partially, without applying it in certain cases. In other situations, however, the legal rule is extended to cases not initially contemplated.
2.2. Logical Interpretation
Logical interpretation, a hermeneutic procedure initially applied to the Scriptures, represented an intermediate stage between the literal and the spiritual. It diverged from the text but considered it the expression of the author’s general idea, potentially not present elsewhere in their work. The text must be understood within its context, allowing for the isolation and extraction of the inspirational ideas of each regulatory context, which constitute the indispensable support for interpreting a specific provision.
The investigation of the underlying purpose was achieved through records, definition, division, and analogy. These procedures isolated the essence of institutes, institutions, or broader legal figures, their specific characteristics relative to other institutes of the same type, and the formal analogies they maintained.
All this was done within the limits of interpretation using Aristotelian logic and logical-dialectical rules. Under the guise of logical interpretation, the doctrine carried out creative work: “forcing” texts with logical-dialectical tools, they built a system of legal concepts adequate to the needs of the time. It is crucial to highlight how the commentators’ work reaffirmed the dependence on the text while progressively distancing itself from the original meaning of the established rules.
2.3. The Use of Aristotelian-Scholastic Dialectic, Especially Topical
Logical interpretation involved using a complex dialectical logic that allowed the systematic production of a right that was inherently unsystematic and even contradictory. This instrument was strengthened by Aristotelian-scholastic dialectic.
In the Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition, dialectic is the art of argumentation. Discussion is formally defined as material. If there are no true dialectical themes that definitively settle questions, issues can always be addressed from multiple perspectives, moving towards a solution based on different, and sometimes opposing, arguments. Argumentation is a reflection on an issue studied from various viewpoints, considering different factors.
The most important task of discussion theory is to find the perspectives and arguments from which issues can be considered. These perspectives and arguments are termed places or topics.
Medieval legal thought used dialectical processes and topical methods to find arguments. The significant work of legal thought during this time was integrating Roman, canon, feudal, and municipal law into a single system. Each jurisdiction had its own perspectives and legitimacy source, with contradictory yet autonomous orders. Their compatibility within a single order constituted a typical task of the art of discussion, which, starting from different perspectives, sought consensus.
The practice of organizing discussion around consensual principles becomes more generic and superficial as consensus broadens. Agreement is not about specific content but around general formulas free of specific references.
Discourse theory and legal methodology recognized the weakness of generic formulations, insisting that “specific legal solutions cannot be extracted from general rules, but must be inferred from them,” and that “every generic definition is dangerous.”
Late medieval schools developed these general legal principles, later adopted by law schools as postulates of rational law.