Dictata ad ius Hodiernum/Lectures on the Contemporary Law (Ms Leeuwarden P. B. F., Hof 33) (review)

South Africa's legal history is inextricably tied to that of the Netherlands. When Jan Van Riebeck sailed into what is now Cape Town in 1652, Roman-Dutch law obtained in South Africa. As its name implies, Roman-Dutch Law combines the customs and statutes of the Netherlands with Justinian's compilation of the Roman law (c. 533-35 AD), the so-called Corpus iuris civilis, comprising four main texts: the Digest, containing the opinions of a number of the most eminent Roman jurists and arranged in fifty books; the Code, a collection of the legislation of previous Emperors; the Novels, later decrees issued by Justinian himself; and the Institutes, a treatise summarising the Roman law and intended for use by students. With the Netherlands' rise to global prominence as a colonial power, the seventeenth century witnessed an efflorescence of Dutch Roman legal teaching and scholarship, evident in the works of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). But, while his emphasis was largely theoretical, eighteenth-century Dutch teachers of law, such as Johannes Voet (1647-1713), focussed on the more practical aspects of the law. In particular, they sought to determine which aspects of the Corpus iuris still applied and which had been abrogated by local custom or statute, that is the study of the ius hodiernum (contemporary law).

Margaret Hewett's introduction to her transcription, edition, and facing-page English translation of Jacobus Voorda's (1698-1768) Dictata ad ius Hodiernum (Lectures on the Contemporary Law) fails to adequately foreground Voorda and his work in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in law teaching and legal theory, a circumstance for which she makes no apology (p. xxx). Indeed, this two-volume work of the Dictata, or lectures, given by Voorda at the University of Utrecht between 1744 and 1770, is not intended for a general audience. In the Preface, she acknowledges that her task here, rather, was to complete the work begun by the late Professor Paul van Warmeloo's partial Dutch-language critical edition of the Dictata, published in the 1990s (p. vii). Hewett's translation is an attempt, in her own words, to be 'as clear and pragmatic as the original' (p. xxix), a style which lends itself appositely to the lawyers and judges in South African courts who will read this work. Notwithstanding this, her opus will undoubtedly do much for scholarship on eighteenth-century legal and intellectual history, by making Voorda's text accessible to an English-language audience for the first time; the autograph manuscript (Ms Leeuwarden P. B. F., Hof 33), on which she bases her transcription, resides in the Provincial Library of Friesland and is some 1,021 pages in length.

Hewett's edition, therefore, brings to light a lesser-known but important moment in the modern European exposition of the ius hodiernum. Indeed, the Dictata is unique in its treatment of the interaction between Roman and local law at this time, an analysis which modern lawyers would call 'conflict of laws'. It does not confine itself merely to a study of the application of Roman law in one, but in all seven, of the then recently-united provinces of the Netherlands. This gave Voorda's work a degree of utility that few others of the time matched. Further, Voorda's Dictata contains a text-within-a-text, namely a generic style of manual – called a Differentiae iuris – much used by academics in his day, which concisely stated the Roman law from the Digest and then briefly the contemporary law of the various provinces in the Netherlands; that is, a short pamphlet of lemmata. The version of the Differentiae iuris which...