Great Christian Jurists in the Low Countries

Description

What impact has Christianity had on law and policies in the Lowlands from the eleventh century through the end of the twentieth century? Taking the gradual 'secularization' of European legal culture as a framework, this volume explores the lives and times of twenty legal scholars and professionals to study the historical impact of the Christian faith on legal and political life in the Low Countries. The process whereby Christian belief systems gradually lost their impact on the regulation of secular affairs passed through several stages, not in the least the Protestant Reformation, which led to the separation of the Low Countries in a Protestant North and a Catholic South in the first place. The contributions take up general issues such as the relationship between justice and mercy, Christianity and politics as well as more technical topics of state-church law, criminal law and social policy.

Wim Decock holds the chair of Roman Law and Legal History at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). He is the author of the prize-winning books Theologians and Contract Law (2013) and Le marche du merite (2019). In 2014, he was awarded the H. M. Leibnitz-Prize by the German Research Foundation. Janwillem Oosterhuis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Methods and Foundations of Law at University of Maastricht. He is the author of Specific Performance in German, French and Dutch Law in the Nineteenth Century (2011). Since 2016, he has been Secretary General of the European Society of Comparative Legal History.