DOCSLIB.ORG

Advocatus, Et Non Latro?: Testing the Excess of Litigation in the Italian Courts of Justice

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Advocatus, Et Non Latro?: Testing the Excess of Litigation in the Italian Courts of Justice View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by LSE Research Online Paolo Buonanno and Matteo M. Galizzi Advocatus, et non latro?: testing the excess of litigation in the Italian courts of justice Article (Published version) (Refereed) Original citation: Buonanno, Paolo and Galizzi, Matteo M. (2014) Advocatus, et non latro?: testing the excess of litigation in the Italian courts of justice. Review of Law & Economics, 10 (3). pp. 285-322. ISSN 2194-6000 DOI: 10.1515/rle-2014-0022 © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60800/ Available in LSE Research Online: March 2015 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. Rev. Law Econ. 2014; 10(3): 285–322 Article Paolo Buonanno* and Matteo M. Galizzi Advocatus, et non Latro? Testing the Excess of Litigation in the Italian Courts of Justice Abstract: We explore the causality relationship between litigation rates and the number of lawyers, drawing on an original panel dataset for the 169 Italian first- instance courts of justice between 2000 and 2007. In this time period, both the number of lawyers and the civil litigation rate sharply increased, and a mandatory minimum fee was in place for lawyers’ services. We first document that the number of lawyers is positively correlated with different measures of the litigation rate. Then, using an instrumental variables strategy, we find that a 10% increase in lawyers over population is associated with an increase between 1.6 and 6% in civil litigation rates. Our empirical analysis supports the supplier-induced demand (SID) hypothesis for Italian lawyers: following a sharp increase in the number of lawyers, and in the impossibility of competing on price because of the minimum fee regula- tion, some lawyers may have opportunistically used their informational advantage to induce their clients to bring lawsuits into court more often than would have been optimal if they were acting in the exclusive interest of their clients. Keywords: lawyers, litigation rates, credence goods JEL Classification: H41, J44, K41 DOI 10.1515/rle-2014-0022 Sanctus Ivo erat Brito Advocatus et non latro Res miranda populo Saint Ivo was Breton A lawyer and not a thief A marvellous thing to the people. (From the inscription in Treguier on the alleged grave of Saint Ivo of Kermartin, patron saint of lawyers, a lawyer himself.) *Corresponding author: Paolo Buonanno, Department of Economics, University of Bergamo, Via dei Caniana 2, Bergamo, Italy, E-mail: [email protected] Matteo M. Galizzi, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics, Cowdray House, Houghton Street, London, UK; School of Law, University of Brescia, Via San Faustino 41, Brescia, Italy, E-mail: [email protected] Brought to you by | London School of Economics and Political Science Authenticated Download Date | 3/9/15 12:32 PM 286 P. Buonanno and M. M. Galizzi 1 Motivation Italy is quite rarely at the top of international rankings. In few other fields can it exhibit as impressive a collection of records as in the international comparison of judicial systems. Italy is the European country with the highest absolute number of both incoming and pending civil proceedings in courts. It is also one of the European countries with the highest number of lawyers per 100,000 inhabitants: 290, compared to the 168 of Germany, 76 of France, and 22 of England (CEPEJ, 2008). When looking at the data, what is most surprising is the impressive rate at which the number of lawyers has increased in the last decades: according to the body which runs the Italian lawyers’ social security scheme (Cassa Nazionale Forense), lawyers have more than tripled in Italy, jumping from 42,366 in 1990 to 143,976 professionals in 2008 (þ 239.84%). In just 7 years (2000–2007) the number of lawyers has risen from 82,637 to 136,750 professionals (þ 65.47%). Surprisingly, this jump in the number of lawyers occurred in a period when the national GDP was increasing at one of the lowest rates since the Second World War (IMF, 2012). Over the same period, the litigation rate, measured by the number of first-instance ordinary civil proceedings per 1,000 inhabitants, has also significantly increased: incoming proceedings rose from 524.3 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1990 to 658.8 in 2007 (þ 25.7%), while pending proceedings passed from 804.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1990 to as many as 1,644.7 in 2007 (þ 104.4%).1 As Figure 1 shows, the correlation between the number of lawyers operating in each of the 169 first-instance Italian courts of justice and the litigation rate in each province is strongly positive.2 In this work, we explicitly test the supplier-induced demand (SID) hypoth- esis for the Italian courts of justice in the years between 2000 and 2007, a period when more than 50,000 new lawyers entered the market. In analogy to what has often been found for medical professionals in the health economics literature, we hypothesize that the high number of lawyers competing for cases in a court of justice, together with the impossibility of competing on price because of the minimum fee regulation, could lead some lawyers to opportunistically take advantage of their informational advantage to “induce” their clients to bring 1 It is worth noticing, as in Marchesi (2003), that the ratio between pending proceedings and incoming proceedings passed from 363.7 in 2000 to 249.7 in 2007. 2 The correlation between the number of lawyers per 1,000 inhabitants and the litigation rate is 0.483 and it is significant at the 1% level. Brought to you by | London School of Economics and Political Science Authenticated Download Date | 3/9/15 12:32 PM Testing the Excess of Litigation in the Italian Courts of Justice 287 Figure 1: Correlation between lawyers and total litigation rate by province (average 2000–2007) lawsuits before a court more often than would be optimal when acting in the exclusive interest of their clients. Using an original provincial-level dataset, we first exploit the panel struc- ture of the data to estimate a model, which allows for both province- and time- fixed effects, while controlling for a wide range of covariates and control vari- ables, including the number of judges in the court, and major socio-demo- graphic and economic characteristics of the province, such as the levels of GDP, employment rate, education, population density, urbanization rate, and social capital. To address the causality relation, we then employ a two-stage- least-squared (2SLS) approach and consider two instrumental variables that are correlated with the number of lawyers in the province, but uncorrelated with unobserved factors that can affect litigation. The first instrument, based on the methodology proposed by Card (1993), is the 8-year lagged average proximity of the province to the three closest university colleges offering law courses neces- sary to become a lawyer. The second “historical” instrument is the provincial proximity to a law School founded in the Middle Ages. Our main result is that the number of lawyers operating in a court does indeed exert a positive and statistically significant effect on the litigation Brought to you by | London School of Economics and Political Science Authenticated Download Date | 3/9/15 12:32 PM 288 P. Buonanno and M. M. Galizzi rate. A 10% increase in the number of lawyers over the population is associated with a 1.6–6% increase in litigation rates. This effect is robust across several specifications and checks, both on the control variables and on the instruments. Our results thus support the SID hypothesis for the Italian courts of justice for the years 2000–2007, a period of time where massive inflows of new lawyers entered the market and a mandatory minimum fee regulation was in place. In those years, the minimum fees for services may have prevented lawyers from responding to tougher competition by adjusting their prices, as would have occurred in a competitive market setting. As a consequence, some lawyers may have reacted to the higher pressure on the supply side by succumbing more often to the temptation of using their informa- tional advantage in an opportunistic way, by inducing part of the demand for legal services from their clients. This induced demand could have resulted in an inflation of the number of lawsuits brought before the courts and thus of the litigation rates. Our work is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the main character- istics of the organization of justice and the legal profession in Italy. Section 3 describes the data and the variables used in our empirical estimates. Section 4 reports the empirical strategy and the estimation results, while Section 5 pre- sents the robustness checks. Section 6 discusses some background for the present work, and, in particular, relates our evidence to the institutional context in Italy and to previous findings in the literatures in law and economics and health economics. It also contains a discussion on how the conceptual frame- work traditionally used by the health economics literature to analyze SID can be adjusted to account for the presence of minimum fees for services in the market.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Cooter & Gell V. Hartmarx Corp., Caveat Advocatus, The
    Valparaiso University Law Review Volume 25 Number 2 Winter 1991 pp.311-330 Winter 1991 Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., Caveat Advocatus, The Growing Impact of Rule 11 Sanctions Craig K. Van Ess Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Craig K. Van Ess, Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., Caveat Advocatus, The Growing Impact of Rule 11 Sanctions, 25 Val. U. L. Rev. 311 (1991). Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol25/iss2/6 This Comment is brought to you for free and open access by the Valparaiso University Law School at ValpoScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Valparaiso University Law Review by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staff member at [email protected]. Van Ess: Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., Caveat Advocatus, The Growing Im NOTE FUNDING INDIANA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS: A QUESTION OF EQUAL AND ADEQUATE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY It will be a great day when the Schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.' INTRODUCTION Indiana public schools must provide equal and adequate educational opportunity for all the state's children,2 yet Indiana schools face a funding crisis. Indiana has traditionally funded public education at a level below the national average, and the funding gap between Indiana and the national average continues to grow.3 The educational performance of Indiana students also ranks below the national average, despite recent efforts to improve Indiana schools.
    [Show full text]
  • Charles V, Monarchia Universalis and the Law of Nations (1515-1530)
    +(,121/,1( Citation: 71 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 79 2003 Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline Mon Jan 30 03:58:51 2017 -- Your use of this HeinOnline PDF indicates your acceptance of HeinOnline's Terms and Conditions of the license agreement available at http://heinonline.org/HOL/License -- The search text of this PDF is generated from uncorrected OCR text. -- To obtain permission to use this article beyond the scope of your HeinOnline license, please use: Copyright Information CHARLES V, MONARCHIA UNIVERSALIS AND THE LAW OF NATIONS (1515-1530) by RANDALL LESAFFER (Tilburg and Leuven)* Introduction Nowadays most international legal historians agree that the first half of the sixteenth century - coinciding with the life of the emperor Charles V (1500- 1558) - marked the collapse of the medieval European order and the very first origins of the modem state system'. Though it took to the end of the seven- teenth century for the modem law of nations, based on the idea of state sover- eignty, to be formed, the roots of many of its concepts and institutions can be situated in this period2 . While all this might be true in retrospect, it would be by far overstretching the point to state that the victory of the emerging sovereign state over the medieval system was a foregone conclusion for the politicians and lawyers of * I am greatly indebted to professor James Crawford (Cambridge), professor Karl- Heinz Ziegler (Hamburg) and Mrs. Norah Engmann-Gallagher for their comments and suggestions, as well as to the board and staff of the Lauterpacht Research Centre for Inter- national Law at the University of Cambridge for their hospitality during the period I worked there on this article.
    [Show full text]
  • Suppose It to Be So
    188 L A W GLOSSARY. by a fine of twenty-five asses, or pounds of brass. But if the injury was more atrocious, as, for instance, if any one deprived another of the use of a limb, (si membrum rapsit, i. e. ruperit,) he was punished by retaliation, \talione,) if the person injured would not accept of any other satisfaction. If he only dislocated or broke a bone, he paid three hundred asses, if the suffer er was a freeman ; and one hundred and fifty, if a slave. Gell. xx. If any one slandered another by defamatory verses, (si quis aliquem publice diffamas- set, eique adversus bonos mores convicium fecissit,�i. e. "if any one defamed another, or cast reproach on him contrary to good manners or morality ;" " affronted him (vel carmen famosum in eum condidisset)�i. e. made an in famous libel upon him," he was beaten with a club, vid. Hor. Sat. ii. which alludes to the law for this species of libel. But these laws gradually fell into disuse, Gell. xx. ; and by the edicts of the Prcetor, an action was granted on account of ail personal injuries and af fronts only, for a fine, which was proportioned according to the dignity of the person, and the nature of the injury. This, however, being found in sufficient to check licentiousness and insolence, Sulla made a new law con cerning injuries, by which, not only a civil action, but also a criminal prose cution, was appointed for certain offences, with the punishment of exile, or working in the mines.
    [Show full text]
  • The Count of Saint-Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalypse
    University of Tennessee, Knoxville Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2015 The ounC t of Saint-Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalypse: Occitanian Piety and Culture in the Time of the First Crusade Thomas Whitney Lecaque University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Recommended Citation Lecaque, Thomas Whitney, "The ounC t of Saint-Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalypse: Occitanian Piety and Culture in the Time of the First Crusade. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2015. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3434 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Thomas Whitney Lecaque entitled "The ounC t of Saint-Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalypse: Occitanian Piety and Culture in the Time of the First Crusade." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Jay Rubenstein, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Thomas Burman, Jacob Latham, Rachel Golden Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) The Count of Saint-Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalypse: Occitanian Piety and Culture in the Time of the First Crusade A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Thomas Whitney Lecaque August 2015 ii Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Whitney Lecaque All rights reserved.
    [Show full text]
  • Criminal Prosecution and the Rationalization of Criminal Justice Final Report
    If you have issues viewing or accessing this file contact us at NCJRS.gov. 1337?11 Criminal Prosecution and The Rationalization of Criminal Justice Final Report by William F. McDonald National Institute of Justice Fellow 133787 U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice This document has been reproduced exactly as received from the person or organization originating it. Points of view or opinions stated in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the National Institute of Justice. Permission to reproduce this 1_ I material has been gr~{l'bblic DOD.ain/NI~T u.s. Department of dustlce to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS). Further reproduction oUlside of the NCJRS systern requires perrnis- sion of the • I owner. National Institute of Justice u.s. Department of Justice December, 1991 Acknowledgments This study was supported by Grant No. 88-IJ-CX-0026 from the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, u.s. Department of Justice to Georgetown University which made possible my participation in the NIJ Fellowship Program. It was also supported by my sabbatical grant from Georgetown University, which allowed me to conduct interviews and observations on the Italian justice system. And, it was supported by a travel' grant from the Institute of Criminal Law and Procedure, Georgetown University Law Center. I would like to acknowledge my appreciation to the many people who made this entire undertaking the kind of intellectually and personally rewarding experience that one usually only dreams about. I hope that their generosity and support will be repaid to some extent by this report and by other contributions to the criminal justice literature which emerge from my thirteen months of uninterrupted exploration of the subject of this Fellowship.
    [Show full text]
  • Jews and the Monasteries of Germany
    NEIGHBORS, PARTNERS, ENEMIES: JEWS AND THE MONASTERIES OF GERMANY IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by John D. Young __________________________________ John Van Engen, Director Graduate Program in Medieval Studies Notre Dame, Indiana September 2011 © Copyright by John D. Young 2011 All rights reserved NEIGHBORS, PARTNERS, ENEMIES: JEWS AND THE MONASTERIES OF GERMANY IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES Abstract by John D. Young German-speaking lands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were home to the largest Jewish communities north of the Alps and Pyrenees and thus constituted key locations for Christian-Jewish interaction. This dissertation examines the monasteries of Germany—the primary centers of intellectual and cultural production in the high medieval Empire—as loci for that interaction. It explores both the social/economic and the cultural aspect of contact between monks and Jews. In the process, it challenges traditional interpretations of Christian-Jewish relations and helps to fill in the picture of the lives and activities of monks in this period. The study proceeds in three parts. Part one, comprising the first three chapters, examines the political context wherein Jews and monks interacted before investigating evidence of contact between Jews and monks in the social and economic spheres. This evidence demonstrates that Jewish communities and monasteries occupied similar John D. Young political positions in this society—due to their mutual reliance on the institution of privilege—and that they engaged frequently in business dealings with each other.
    [Show full text]
  • Abstract: in This Article, the Author Assumes the Role As Advocatus Diabolic (Devil’S Advocate) in the Case of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic
    International Studies Journal (ISJ) Vol. 16, No. 3 (63), Winter 2020 Received Date: 15 February 2020 Accept Date: 1 March 2020 PP: 1-54 From Advocatus Diabolic on the COVID-19 Pandemic to Ethical Concerns & International Relations Prof. Dr. Anja Matwijkiw * Abstract: In this article, the author assumes the role as advocatus diabolic (devil’s advocate) in the case of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus crisis casts a different light on recent laws in various European countries that conduct value politics to conserve the cultural status quo . One example is De nmark’s 2018 law L 80 that requires a handshake in a constitutional ceremony that forms an integral and mandatory part of the nationalization process of new citizens. However illiberal, the measure may be too liberal, so the devil ’s advocate argues. Since the pandemic affects the world order as such and, at the same time, is the outcome of globalization according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the account accommodates an attempt to address the situation at the level of international relations. The most central coronavirus- related effect concerns ethics. Unfortunately, it appears that the mutual blame game in politics is at the expense of ethics. The tough choice belongs to the civil society – to refuse to have shared stakes sidelined. * U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Public International Law, Faculty of Law, Lund University & Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law; Professor of Ethics & Human Rights, Indiana University Graduate School & IU Northwest Philosophy Department, United States. / Email: [email protected] and [email protected] 2 & International Studies Journal (ISJ), Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Black's Law Dictionary®
    BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY® Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence, Ancient and Modern By HENRY CAMPBELL BLACK, M. A. SIXTH EDITION BY THE PUBLISHER'S EDITORIAL STAFF Coauthors JOSEPH R. NOLAN Associate Justice, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and JACQUELINE M. NOLAN-HALEY Associate Clinical Professor, Fordham University School of Law Contributing Authors M. J. CONNOllY Associate Professor (Linguistics), College of Arts & Sciences, Boston College STEPHEN C. HICKS Professor of Law, Suffolk University Law School, Boston, MA MARTINA N. All BRANDI Certified Public Accountant, Bolton, MA ST. PAUL, MINN. WEST PUBLISHING CO. 1990 "BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY" is a registered trademark of West Publishing Co. Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. COPYRIGHT @ 1891, 1910, 1933, 1951, 1957, 1968, 1979 WEST PUBLISHING CO. COPYRIGHT @ 1990 By WEST PUBLISHING CO. 50 West Kellogg Boulevard P.O. Box 64526 St. Paul, Mn 55164-0526 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Black, Henry Campbell, 1850-1927. [Law dictionary] Black's law dictionary / by Henry Campbell Black. - 6th ed. / by the publisher's editorial staff; contributing authors, Joseph R. Nolan ... let al.] p. cm. ISBN 0-314-76271-X 1. Law-United States-Dictionaries. 2. Law-Dictionaries. I. Nolan, Joseph R. II. Title. KF156.B53 1990 340' .03-dc20 90-36225 CIP ISBN 0-314-76271-X ISBN 0-314-77165-4 deluxe Black's Law Dictionary 6th Ed. 2nd Reprint-1990 PREFACE This new Sixth Edition starts a second century for Black's Law Dictionary-the standard authority for legal definitions since 1891.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter Three
    chapter three PRAETORIAN PREFECTS AND OTHER HIGH-RANKING EQUESTRIANS In the past, scholars have perceived a rise of the equites during the third century ad.1 However, this view is problematic in more than one way.AlreadyinthehighPrincipate—fromtheFlaviantotheAntonine emperors—, the equestrian ordo was an even more heterogeneous group than the higher-ranking ordo senatorius.Withinthepoliticalsystem,the most significant subset of equites contained those who served as eques- trian officers in the army and senior civil administrators.2 Junior equites served as tribuni militum of legions and as praefecti of cohorts and cav- alry units. Each year about posts were available for senior officers of equestrian rank. These military officer-posts were a necessary hurdle for advancement to senior civil-administrative positions.3 Later, from the second century ad, the post of advocatus fisci became an alternative pre- cursor.4 Later in their careers, equites could serve as provincial procura- tores, who were responsible for financial administration and sometimes military logistics, and supervised freedmen procurators who themselves administered imperial properties in their provinces. Furthermore, equi- tes could be governors of minor provinces or imperial secretaries at court. 1 The notion of the rise of the equites was defined by Keyes (). Cf. Stein (), –; Rémondon (), –; Alföldy (), . 2 Millar (), –, for instance, identifies three subsets within the ordo:() holders of the public horse, () jurors at Rome, and () military and civilian office-holders. For the purpose of this study I will focus only on the senior members of the last subset, as this group constituted, along with senior senators, the political elite of the Empire. It should be noted, however, that only a minority of the equites belonged to this subset of office-holders.
    [Show full text]
  • The Formation and Progress of the Tiers État, Or Third Estate in France Vol
    The Online Library of Liberty A Project Of Liberty Fund, Inc. Augustin Thierry, The Formation and Progress of the Tiers État, or Third Estate in France vol. 2 [1856] The Online Library Of Liberty This E-Book (PDF format) is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a private, non-profit, educational foundation established in 1960 to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. 2010 was the 50th anniversary year of the founding of Liberty Fund. It is part of the Online Library of Liberty web site http://oll.libertyfund.org, which was established in 2004 in order to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. To find out more about the author or title, to use the site's powerful search engine, to see other titles in other formats (HTML, facsimile PDF), or to make use of the hundreds of essays, educational aids, and study guides, please visit the OLL web site. This title is also part of the Portable Library of Liberty DVD which contains over 1,000 books and quotes about liberty and power, and is available free of charge upon request. The cuneiform inscription that appears in the logo and serves as a design element in all Liberty Fund books and web sites is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, in present day Iraq. To find out more about Liberty Fund, Inc., or the Online Library of Liberty Project, please contact the Director at [email protected].
    [Show full text]
  • Legal Profession During the Middle Ages: the Emergence of the English Lawyer Prior to 1400 XVIII Anton-Hermann Chroust
    Notre Dame Law Review Volume 32 | Issue 2 Article 3 3-1-1957 Legal Profession during the Middle Ages: The Emergence of the English Lawyer Prior to 1400 XVIII Anton-Hermann Chroust Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Anton-Hermann Chroust, Legal Profession during the Middle Ages: The Emergence of the English Lawyer Prior to 1400 XVIII, 32 Notre Dame L. Rev. 268 (1957). Available at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol32/iss2/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Notre Dame Law Review by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE LEGAL PROFESSION DURING THE MIDDLE AGES: THE EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH LAWYER PRIOR TO 1400* XVIII THE APPRENTICES (1) The Royal Rescript of 1292, among other matters, had referred to addiscentes (apprenticii,apprentices). Thus it appears that outside the relatively small circle of practicing pleaders (narratores)or practicing attornati,there existed a number of "apprentices" or "learners of the law." Natu- rally, prior to the year 1270, the English legal profession it- self was still inconspicuous. Hence mere aspirants to this inconspicuous profession were still more inconspicuous, so much so that they had no official status. But by the year 1300 the courts as well as the statutes had taken notice of them. Chief Justice Bereford's remark in 1310 to Westcote, a counsel, implied that the latter's observations had been very instructive for the apprentices: "Really, I am much obliged to you for your challenge, and for the sake of the young men here [in court] ..
    [Show full text]
  • Bishop Conrad III of Kamień Pomorski: a Common Clergyman and a Politician in the Duchy of Pomerania in 1233–1241
    Medieval Studies, vol. 22, 2018 / Studia z Dziejów Średniowiecza, tom 22, 2018 Mariola Freza-Olczyk (University of Gdańsk) https://orcid.org/ 0000-0001-5088-9475 Mariola Freza-Olczyk Bishop Conrad III of Kamień Pomorski: a common clergyman and a politician in the Duchy of Pomerania in 1233–1241 Bishop Conrad III of Kamień Pomorski… Keywords: Bischop Conrad III, Cistercian Order, Kamień Pomorski, Duchy of Pomerania This essay presents the figure of Conrad Salzwedel, the bishop of Kamień Pomorski (1233–1241). The first objective is to describe briefly his origins and career history. After illustrating this general information relating to his personal life and his activity as a clergyman, the second part of this paper focuses on major documents and dona- tions. The aim here is to portray Conrad III as a generous founder. Another essential point is to study his diplomatic relations with the Griffins, a dynasty from the Duchy of Pomerania. One of the points of this article is to outline the many conflicts Conrad Salzwedel had with other bishops. This is a complex problem which requires more consideration than is presented herein. The last part of this text exam- ines the chief purposes of the agreement of 1240 between the bishop of Kamień Pomorski and the Pomeranian duke Barnim I. Conrad III Salzwedel was born in the North March into a noble family which belonged to the free knighthood. His exact birth date is unknown, although scholars believe it was between 1170 and 1180.1 1 Albrecht Georg von Schwarz, Diplomatische Geschichte der Pommersch – Rugis- chen Städte Schwedischer Hoheit nach ihrem Ursprung, und erster Verfassung, nebst angehaugter Historie der Pommerschen Grafschaft Gützkow, 1755, pp.
    [Show full text]