It’s never happened before with the British or English crown (maybe in Scotland? ), but it has happened a few times wuth peerages.
Thank you. This was very informative.
Only in Britain are you likely to have a legal opinion based on a precedent from 644 years previously.
Or plenty of other places in the world, other than the Americas.
The difference between us and them is that a European thinks 100 miles is a long distance, and an American thinks that 100 years is a long time.
I recall someone giving a tour of Oxford (I think it was) and mentioned something like “this is the new hall, built in 1750”. I’m thinking, the city I come from was untouched forest in 1750.
I recently had the opportunity to spend a couple of weeks in the Greek islands. While exploring one island with a village resident as a guide, we were shown a water channel, made of fitted stone and still in use, that led from a natural spring to the village center. It was originally constructed about a thousand years BC, and had been rebuilt and refurbished a few times since then. The last major maintenance, she said, was “not that long ago” — only about 300 years. If she was yanking our chain, there was nothing in her demeanor to give it away. Totally straight face, a fact dropped unadorned into the narrative.
This is perfect and will be stolen.
No, it’s actually rather rare. Because law is tied so intimately to government, in countries that have a major change in their constitutional structure, their laws will normally change as well, especially in a country that goes through either a period of imperialism, or a period of revolutionary change. That’s most of the world.
Take France, for example. At the revolution, it had a huge variety of local laws, based on ancient feudal principles, some Frankish inheritances (particularly in the north), and heavy influence of Justinian. Napoleon did away with that, in producing the Napoleonic Code: a single set of civil laws for all of France, consistent wtih the revolutionary goal of a unitary French nation, and also consistent with the revolutionary goal of eliminating feudalism. Once the Code came into force, all those pre-revolutionary precedents went to the dustbin.
The same pattern happened across Europe, particularly in Germany, with its huge collection of little dukedoms and principalities. Unification and codification went hand in hand, eliminating all those little local laws. The pattern repeated in other European civil law countries, to the point that codification is now the hallmark of the civil law; and codes eliminate the legal force of earlier court precedents.
And civil law and codification have spread world-wide; the civil law is the dominant legal system, not the common law, in terms of the numbers of countries which use it.
Same thing happened in Russia and China. Part of their revolutions was the overthrow of the feudal system. They too have legal systems which post-date their revolutions. Both draw to some extent on the civil law, but also have incorporated customary Russian and Chinese law into those statutes, so the statutes are the governing law, not pre-revolutionary feudal laws. That pattern in turn repeated in countries which came under Soviet and Chinese political influence.
Countries which have been under colonial / imperial rule have even more complicated histories, because the colonial rule normally interrupted customary legal systems, and then when those countries gained independence, either by revolution or agreement, they often tried to cut links to the past and establish new legal systems.
That’s not to say that the pre-imperial law doesn’t still have some application. Normally, customary law of land-holding and family law tend to be the most stable parts of a legal system. But, those customary indigenous laws tend to get incorporated into modern statutes by the new post-colonial national governments, in attempts to modernise and unify the new country.
The big exception, and one which I can’t comment on, is Sharia law. I don’t know if that has been incorporated into statute law in some Muslim countries, or is still a precedent based system.
@AK84 is in a better place to comment on legal issues outside the European world than I am.
The Napoleonic Code was not the first legal code to be established in a European country with a civil-law legal system; it was preceded by the Codex Maximilianeus bavaricus civilis (Bavaria, 1756), the Allgemeines Landrecht (Prussia, 1794), and the West Galician Code (Galicia, then part of Austria, 1797). It was, however, the first modern legal code to be adopted with a pan-European scope, and it strongly influenced the law of many of the countries formed during and after the Napoleonic Wars.[2] The Napoleonic Code influenced developing countries outside Europe, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, attempting to modernize and defeudalize their countries through legal reforms.[3]
Oxford guides love saying this kind of thing, especially to ‘upstart’ Americans…
It’s a precedent based system in Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and codified everywhere else.
Note the thing the above three countries have in common. Pun most definitely intended.
and of course Scotland is the major exception to codification in the civil law world. 
Is Quebec codified or not?
Yes. For the purposes of civil law, Quebec uses a Civil Code that was written in the legal tradition of the Napoleonic Code of France. This is actually the province’s second civil code; the first one, the Civil Code of Lower Canada, was adopted in Canada East/Lower Canada (the Eastern part of the then-colony of Canada) in 1866, the year before Confederation (in which Canada East was separated from Canada West and the two became the provinces of Quebec and Ontario respectively). Prior to that, Canada East had used Parisian customary law, but since this was no longer in force in France, there were no current legal commentaries of the same, and it was decided to adopt a Napoleonic-style written Code. The current Civil Code of Quebec replaced the Civil Code of Lower Canada in 1994 and is written in the same tradition but is a more modern law.
Earlier this year, the Quebec National Assembly (legislature) passed Bill 2, an extensive amendment of the Civil Code and other laws with the intention to combat family violence and to make the law of Quebec more friendly to gender non-binary people. One major change is that the phrase “the father and mother”, which is used extensively in the Civil Code and other laws, was changed to “the father and mother or the parents”, (or various grammatical variations of this), in order to cover people who have children but, due to being gender non-binary, might not identify as “father” or “mother”.
New College, Oxford, was founded in 1379. Of course, at that time, it was the “new” college, compared to the existing ones, so that makes perfect sense.
Similarly, the oldest bridge in Paris is the “new bridge”, Pont Neuf, completed in 1606.
I’d love to know what a typical curriculum would have looked like.
The usual medieval European university curriculum, which was surprisingly uniform all across Europe at the time. You’d begin at the liberal arts faculty, where you would first study the “trivium” of rhetoric, grammar and logic and then the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. Usually this was done in the form of lectures on writings by classic ancient authors, and exams would take the form of a disputation where a student would have to defend a given hypothesis (“quaestio”). After graduating from this faculty, students would then be able to move on towards one of the other three “higher” faculties, law, medicine, or theology.
I’ve always found it interesting that the modern American tertiary education, with a generalist bachelor’s degree before you’d specialise in a discipline at the postgraduate level, is much closer to the medieval European universities than present-day universities in Europe are.
Thanks for this.
A liitle older than Amsterdam’s “New Church” which dates back to about 1405. The “Old Church” is about a century older.
Some time back I was making a list of cities in the US named for cities in other countries. When I got to Radnor PA, I found that it was named for Radnor, Wales. Well there isn’t actually a Radnor, Wales. What there is is a New Radnor and an Old Radnor, a few miles apart. I read their Wiki pages to see if there was anything to help decide which place it was actually named for (didn’t help, though). They apparently don’t know when Old Radnor was built, but New Radnor was built sometime around 1070, built by the Normans as a castle to defend against or subjugate the Welsh, I’m not sure which.
But that’s nowhere near the oldest “New” town. The oldest I’m aware of is Carthage, which means “New Town” in Phoenician. Carthage in turn founded it’s own Carthage, which the Romans called Cartago Nova (or New New Town), and today is known as Cartagena, Spain.
Prague’s New Town dates from 1348.