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Corpus Iuris Civilis and Corpus Iuris Hungarici - The influence of Roman legal tradition on the Hungarian and Croatian law

Traditional, in other words, pre-1848 Hungarian and Croatian law was not free from the influence of Roman law and other foreign laws. The formation of the Christian kingdom was connected with the organization of the Latin Church. Consequently, the Latin terminology was used for Hungarian and Croatian legal institutions regardless of whether they appeared in statutory legal rules or their individual elements were referred to and expounded as customary law. However, this did not lead to the prevalence of Canon law and, through it, Roman law. It is possible to show some influences of or correspondences with Canon law and Roman law, but they did not have a crucial impact on the basic institutions that had developed in Hungarian and Croatian law, more precisely, in nobiliary law, even more because the customary collection called Tripartitum (1514) was a powerful legal practice forming work that hindered any major legal transfer. The most powerful influence exerted on pre-1848 Hungarian and Croatian law by foreign law happened in the field of criminal law. This reception was a customary legal one, because the Hungarian courts of first instance having criminal jurisdiction started to use – as part of the Hungarian legal customs – in their practice a sample of the Criminal Code of Ferdinand III – given for the province of Lower-Austria along 1656 – translated into Latin, mainly because it has been attached to the materials of the Hungarian collection of decrees, called Corpus Iuris Hungarici along 1696. Regarding the private law, it has to be pointed out that the Hungarian judicial practice and doctrine since 1848 onwards – due to the withering away of the feudal relations and consecutive failed attempts to passmodern national civil code – gradually elevated ius commune, i.e. received Roman law, to the level of a subsidiary source of law. In certain Croatian areas, to be more precise in Međimurje and Baranja, the Hungarian private law, based on Werbőczy’s Tripartitum, as well as on the numerous later regulations that formed together Corpus Iuris Hungarici, was still law in force after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. The Croatian doctrine between the two World Wars also supported the conceiving that ius commune is a subsidiary source of Hungarian private law. Thus, for example, legal doctrine resolutely emphasizes that where ‘[…] there are no positive regulations, the principles of ius commune, i.e. Pandect law should be applied without hesitation, as they formed the basis of the Austrian civil code and […] Hungarian private law’. Such a situation with regard to the legal sources of the Hungarian private law did not change in Croatia until April 6, 1941, i.e. the day when the Second World War started on the territory of Croatia. Taking into consideration the aforementioned facts, the purpose of the second part of the paper is to analyze the significance and role of the ius commune as a source of law on the Croatian territories belonging to the former Hungarian legal area until 1941 and its contemporary importance.

Corpus Iuris Hungarici, Roman law, reception, Hungarian private law, Corpus Iuris Civilis

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