Roman-Dutch law
Roman-Dutch law (Dutch: Rooms-Hollands recht, Afrikaans: Romeins-Hollandse reg) is an uncodified, scholarship-driven, judge-made legal system based on Roman law as applied in the Netherlands in the 17th and 18th centuries. As such, it is a variety of the European continental civil law or ius commune. While Roman-Dutch law was superseded by Napoleonic codal law in the Netherlands proper as early as the beginning of the 19th century, Roman-Dutch law is still applied by the courts of South Africa (and its neighbours Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe), Guyana, Indonesia, East Timor, and Sri Lanka. It was largely drawn upon by Scots law. It also had some negligible impact on New York state, especially in introducing the office of prosecutor (schout-fiscaal).
History
Roman law was progressively abandoned during the early Middle Ages. The Theodosian Code and excerpts of latter-day imperial enactments (constitutiones) were well known in the successor Germanic states and vital to maintaining the commonplace principle of folk-right which applied pre-existing Roman law to Roman provincials and Germanic law to Germans. The Breviary of Alaric and the Lex Gundobada Romana are two of the several hybrid Romano-Germanic law codes that incorporated much Roman legal material. However, because the fall of the Western Roman Empire preceded the drafting of the Justinianic Code, early Byzantine law was never influential in Western Europe. Also, much of this early law was superseded by later feudal law. Only canon law successfully retained any substantial amount of Roman law to be influential.
