This book presents a broad overview of succession law, encompassing aspects of family law, testamentary law and legal history. It examines society and legal practice in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present from both a legal and a sociological perspective. The contributing authors investigate various aspects of succession law that have not yet been thoroughly examined by legal historians, and in doing so they not only add to our knowledge of past succession law but also provide a valuable key to interpreting and understanding current European succession law. Readers can explore such issues as the importance of a father’s permission to marry in relation to disinheritance, as well as inheritance transactions and private, dynastic and cross-border successions. Further themes addressed by the expert contributors include women’s inheritance rights, the laws of succession for the prince in legal consulting, and succession in the Rota Romana’s jurisprudence.

Showcases a novel method for approaching private international law combining theoretical insight, textual analysis and historical context.

This pivotal Research Handbook analyses the interconnectedness of family property and the law through historical, contemporary, comparative and jurisdiction-specific lenses. Authors analyse some of the most well-known, contested and politicised legal developments in the field of family property law.

This third volume in a series on Comparative Succession Law concerns the entitlement of family members to override the provisions of a deceased person's will to obtain money or assets (or more money or assets) from the person's estate. Some countries, notably those in the civil law tradition (such as France or Germany), confer a pre-ordained share of the deceased's estate or of its value on certain members of the deceased's family, and especially on the deceased's children and spouse. Other countries, notably those in the common law tradition (such as England, Canada, or Australia), leave the matter to the discretion of the court, the amount awarded depending primarily on financial need. Whichever form it takes, mandatory family provision is both a protection against disinheritance and also, therefore, a restriction on testamentary freedom. The volume focuses on Europe and on countries influenced by the European experience. In addition to detailed treatment of the law in Austria, England and Wales, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Scotland, and Spain, the book also has chapters on Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, Canada, the countries of Latin America, and the People's Republic of China. Some other countries are covered more briefly, and there is a separate chapter on Islamic law. The book opens with accounts of Roman law and of the law in medieval and early-modern Europe, and it concludes with a comparative assessment of the law as it is today in the countries and legal traditions surveyed in this volume.

This interdisciplinary volume discusses the division of the early modern material world into the important legal, economic, and personal categories of mobile and immobile property, possession, and the rights to usufruct. The chapters describe and compare different modes of acquisition and intergenerational transfer via law and custom. The varying perspectives, including cultural history, legal history, social and economic history, philosophy, and law, allow for a more nuanced understanding of the links between the movability of an object and the gender of the person who owned, possessed, or used it. Case studies and examples come from a wide geographical range, including Norway, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Tyrol, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Romania, and the European colonies in Brazil and Jamaica. By covering both urban and rural areas and exploring all social groups, from ruling elites to the lower strata of society, the chapters offer fresh insight into the division of mobile and immobile property that socially and economically posed disadvantages for women. By exploring a broad scope of topics, including landownership, marriage contracts, slaveholding, and the dowry, this book is an essential resource for both researchers and students of women’s history, social and economic history, and material culture.

Drawing together an international team of historians, lawyers and historical sociolinguists, this volume investigates urban cultures of law in Scotland, with a special focus on Aberdeen and its rich civic archive, the Low Countries, Norway, Germany and Poland from c. 1350 to c. 1650. In these essays, the contributors seek to understand how law works in its cultural and social contexts by focusing specifically on the urban experience and, to a great extent, on urban records. The contributions are concerned with understanding late medieval and early modern legal experts as well as the users of courts and legal services, the languages and records of law, and legal activities occurring inside and outside of official legal fora. This volume considers what the expectations of people at different status levels were for the use of the law, what perceptions of justice and authority existed among different groups, and what their knowledge was of law and legal procedure. By examining how different aspects of legal culture came to be recorded in writing, the contributors reveal how that writing itself then became part of a culture of law. Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe: Scotland and its Neighbours c.1350–c.1650 combines the historical study of law, towns, language and politics in a way that will be accessible and compelling for advanced level undergraduates and postgraduate to postdoctoral researchers and academics in medieval and early modern, urban, legal, political and linguistic history.

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of medieval Frisian law, focusing on the influence of Roman and canon law in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It makes use of recent translations of Old Frisian legal texts to show the evolution of Frisian law and to unveil why the Frisians were motivated to change their traditional laws. The book covers everything from oaths as evidence in Frisian procedures, to whether Frisian widows could be guardians of their children, to the role the Frisians themselves played in the evolution of their legal system.

This book presents numerous instruments which create postmortal succession on the example of Polish law. Alongside the solution in inheritance law, one may apply specific inheritance (e.g. of agricultural farms) that benefits only such heirs who meet additional requirements, as well as undertake legal acts that allow to decide on heritability (or non-heritability) character of rights and duties (e.g. within the contract of mandate or company contracts). There are also numerous legislative instruments that allow for succession otherwise than by inheritance so that particular persons (and not heirs) benefit after the decedent. Such instruments include regulations of civil law but also e.g. banking law, social insurance law which are often comparable with nonprobate instruments (or willsubstitutes) under American law or German Sonderrechtsnachfolge.

Dragons, giants, and the monsters of learned discourse are rarely encountered in the Sagas of Icelanders, and therefore, the general teratological focus on physical monstrosity yields only limited results when applied to them. This, however, does not equal an absence of monstrosity – it only means that monstrosity is conceived of differently. This book shifts the view of monstrosity from the physical to the social, accounting for the unique social circumstances presented in the Íslendingasögur and demonstrating how closely interwoven the social and the monstrous are in this genre. Employing literary and cultural theory as well as anthropological and historical approaches, it reads the monsters of the Íslendingasögur in their literary and socio-cultural context, demonstrating that they are not distractions from feud and conflict, but that they are in fact an intrinsic part of the genre’s re-imagining of the past for the needs of the present.

This unique collection makes available, for the first time, translations of medieval Italian jurisprudence, including commentaries, tracts, and legal opinions by leading jurists.