[p. 563]
|563| do ratio and consuetudo iudiciorum, the customary right, the coutumes, contain no laws? – The introduction of the foreign rights brought learned consultants also into the courts, and this practice completed the reduction of those courts, consisting of men of equal standing, of distinguished probity, who gave judgement not for money but for the honour, to that nullity which finally made their abolition even appear necessary.
That fine presentation of Nauclerus, however, the author calls a depiction, made in the most vivid colours, of the ignorance of the Württemberg courts of that time, and goes on on his own account: “In courts where judges sat such as have just been described, to whom then also the many (many indeed!) reasonable extensions and restrictions of the laws were wholly unknown, the multitude of which nowadays puts all non-jurists” (as the members of the jury courts in England and France still are, – an institution which in these countries is regarded as the palladium of freedom) “in no position to decide entangled legal disputes – in such courts the main business of the court scribes could consist only in writing down the foolish and insipid judgements of ignorant judges of a barbarous age.” – One sees that from such views of a juristic member of a German assembly of estates the reawakening of glorious German antiquity, of genuinely national institutions, is not to be expected.
The triumph of the new right, “of the new and courageous Ulpians and the defeats of the Württemberg judges”
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