Cardozo Law Review
Abstract
At the end of the seventeenth century, Johan Nikolaus Hert, a German legal scholar of Roman private law, wrote the treatise De Collisione Legum. He was dealing with one of the most disturbing experiences in his epoch of the emerging nation states-the experience that on earth there was more than one law, more than one justice. Hert stood in stark contrast to his more famous French contemporary, the brilliant Blaise Pascal, who reacted to the same problem with critique, deconstruction, and irony: "A funny justice that ends at a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on that." Invoking systematic construction and elaborate casuistry, Hert was the first and only German to date to make a serious and thorough attempt to resolve nagging questions of conflict of laws. To work out collision rules was the solution. Hert complexified the so-called statutist method according to which collision rules determined jurisdiction by analyzing the nature of the statutes involved. Developing a complex rule system for the collision of laws, Hert felt compelled to distinguish the incredible amount of sixty-three different casuistic constellations in order to fight Pascal's paradox. For this scholarly exercise he became famous, and rightly so. But his immortality in legal circles is based on the desperate sigh which he hove while drawing his tortured distinctions: "quam sudent doctores." How the doctors are sweating!
Keywords
Politics (General), Globalization, Foreign Affairs, European Union
Disciplines
Law
Recommended Citation
Gunther Teubner,
De Collisione Discursuum: Communicative Rationalities in Law, Morality, and Politics,
17
Cardozo L. Rev.
901
(1996).
Available at:
https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol17/iss4/8