University of Chicago Law School Chicago Unbound Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 1994 The Transmission of Legal Institutions: English Law, Roman Law, and Handwritten Wills Richard H. Helmholz Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Richard. H. Helmholz, "The Transmission of Legal Institutions: English Law, Roman Law, and Handwritten Wills," 20 Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce 147 (1994). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE TRANSMISSION OF LEGAL INSTITUTIONS: ENGLISH LAW, ROMAN LAW, AND HANDWRITTEN WILLS R.H. Helmholz* Dean Michael Hoeflich, organizer of this Conference and founder of the Roman Law Society of America, has been a leader in tracing the tangled, continuing, and important relationship between Roman law and Anglo-American law. Through a series of articles, he has lifted the cur- tain on more than one of the facets of this subject, always showing his readers something of value about the inner nature of that relationship.' This article attempts to follow his lead by looking at one particular as- pect of the law of testamentary succession, the validity of unattested, handwritten wills. In one sense this is a very small topic, perhaps wor- thy of only a footnote or two in treatises on the law of wills. However, the subject does provide an excellent example of the much larger phe- nomenon of the transmission of institutions from one legal system to another.