The Renaissance Consilium as Justice

In a provocative essay published in Renaissance Quarterly in 1999, Ullrich Langer investigated the critical positions of novellieri such as Boccaccio regarding the legal system, courts, and lawyers. This essay builds on his work, both by broadening the range of critiques of law to include those of the humanists, and by giving the lawyers their day in court, as it were, in an investigation of two representative case-deciding opinions. Then as now, these legal experts did not have the luxury of considering law and justice in the abstract, apart from the need to resolve the particular case before them: they had to resolve a case and follow the law as they understood it.