The beginnings of modern Europe with which we associate such things as the revival of learning and the Reformation brought with them on the Continent the event which is known as the reception of Roman law.  The traditions of the ancient world had been seen in mediaeval times through mediaeval eyes, and had been moulded to mediaeval needs.  The new age insisted on going back direct to the classical tradition.  It was the actual Roman law of Justinian, not the Roman law as interpreted by mediaeval commentators, that was to be studied and applied.  The break-up of the institutions of the Middle Ages, the growth of absolute monarchical power, the centralization of government, all favoured the tendency.  Roman law contained doctrines eminently pleasing to an absolute ruler, e.g. ‘the decision of the monarch has the force of law’.  In Germany above all, where law was divided into countless local customs, the movement had its fullest effect.  Roman law comes to be the law which is to be applied in the absence of positive enactment or justifiable custom.  The native law finds itself driven to plead for its life, and is lucky if it can satisfy the conditions which are required to enable it to continue as a recognized custom.  In every country of the West outside England, in greater or less degree, the Roman law comes in as something which will at least fill up the gaps, and will purge or remodel the native law.  Even in Scotland texts of the Roman law may be quoted as authorities.  The strength of our own law, and the successful resistance of our public institutions to monarchical power saved us alone from a ‘reception’, in the continental sense, of Roman law.  And even our Blackstone will quote Roman law with respect where it tends to confirm our own rules.

If this reception was a movement which brought about a greater unity in the form and substance of the laws of Western Europe, there was another factor at work which tended in the opposite direction.  The claims of the Empire to universal authority become more and more unreal:  the claims of the Pope are either rejected entirely, or the ecclesiastical sphere is strictly delimited.  The State becomes sovereign.  For this purpose it makes no difference whether it is a High Court of Parliament or an absolute monarch which is the supreme authority:  law comes to be thought of as the command of a sovereign person or assembly.  ‘No law’, we are told, ‘can be unjust’, for law is the standard of justice, and there is no other standard by which the justice of law can be measured.  The fact that there is in every State a sovereign power which can make and unmake the law at its pleasure makes possible the creation of a uniform law for all the subjects of a State, and so far as the State coincides with the nation, makes for the creation of a national unity in law.  Thus Frederick the Great gave a code to Prussia, thus Napoleon gave France a code which swept away the diversities of the provincial