Ius Commune Legal Scholarship and Coherence: the Author's Structure

Over the past decades the characteristics of legal scholarship have been the subject of intense debates. This article aims at confronting strands of arguments on this topic with views concerning ius commune legal scholarship, that is the civil law writings of the European continent in the Old Regime (c. 1200-c. 1800). In so doing, it will be argued that neither relativist or dogmatic approaches provide complete explanations of its features. A case will be made for further exploration of “relative coherence” in the texts of legal authors. Analysis of legal scholarly texts that is aimed at exposing clustered ideas, in the author’s legal thoughts, was practised for some time, from the angle of intellectual history, but for few legal topics only. This approach can be revived and it would allow for a recalibrated method of analysis of the structural traits of pre-modern legal scholarly writings