My study of Bodin's Distributio has shown me how important law trees were for legal pedagogy. But they have the perhaps unintentional consequence of creatively reorganizing legal concepts, thereby breaking free from the stranglehold of medieval legal science that insisted on following the traditional order of Justinian and Gaius. Savigny would later call this generation of lawyers the Systematiker - they are now largely forgotten, but I will give them a starring role in Science of Right (or at least, that is the plan for now).
Here are several versions of a famous law tree that I used as the cover image for my first book - the tree of jurisdictions, accompanying D.2.1.1:
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| Bartolus on D.2.1.1. Courtesy of Robbins Collection, UC Berkeley. Photo: Daniel Lee, 2015. |
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| Bartolus on D.2.1.1. Courtesy of Robbins Collection, UC Berkeley. Photo: Daniel Lee, 2015. |
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| This is from my own personal copy of the Digestum Vetus (Venice, 1569). It has a neat fold-out of the Tree. Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023. |
