BARTOLISTI. — This is the designation given from the fifteenth century onward to the numerous body of jurists who followed that method of studying law which had already enabled the great Bartolo da Sassoferrato in the fourteenth century to derive from the sources of the Corpus iuris the new, more modern civil-law doctrine, and who were at the same time faithful advocates of the soundness of the latter and of its further developments.
The need to adapt the law to the real life of peoples undergoing profound renewal in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, together with the ever-persistent conviction that the primary foundation of law itself continued always to be the texts of the Justinianic Compilation, even if supplemented by canonist and feudal texts, as the common law of all peoples in every age, are the motives that impel and guide the B. in their work.
Nevertheless, the correct use of the scholastic formulas and procedures which Bartolo, and subsequently Baldo degli Ubaldi and their contemporaries, had successfully applied to legal studies had by the beginning of the fifteenth century already yielded its finest fruits; nor did it any longer appear capable of discovering in the texts of the old Roman law those new principles and rules that legal practice daily demanded. Yet reaching this result was the school’s principal task, and it was not permissible for the doctors, now present at every juncture of public and private life, in any way to estrange themselves from the imperative needs of their times.
Thus, for the B., the need to define a law capable of satisfying the manifold needs of the new society prevailed over the sound principles of pure scientific speculation: in order to attain this aim, the scholastic distinctions of the subject under discussion went so far as to fragment and even pulverize it;
the logical deductive process by which one proceeded from the solution of the premises to that of the question was often reduced to a dialectical artifice not free from sophistry; the examination of the texts proceeded through minute analyses, formulations of practical cases, and interminable series of observations and objections, in order finally to discover in them the most appropriate intellectus; reference to the opinions of others, first and foremost those of Bartolo, became so constant and slavish that it was often placed before the very wording of the law, and even historical and philological ignorance sometimes helped to overcome the difficulties posed by the latter.
These were the undeniable defects charged against Bartolism by the earliest humanists of the fifteenth century, and on account of which the learned jurisprudence of the sixteenth century would formally indict the school, as one whose lengthy and abstruse discussions, exasperating dialectic, insistent recourse to the communis opinio, and errors of history and language had corrupted the purity of the Roman laws and rendered the law obscure.
But while it is true that the mos italicus, or Bartolist method, as it was called, was guilty of those serious defects, it is equally true that from that dialectic, that formalism, and that very obscurity of exposition there generally arose for it at least the first germ of the new law demanded by populations and tribunals; whereas through the literary and historical study of the sources, or mos gallicus, established and rapidly disseminated in Europe by the learned jurists, Roman law ultimately and increasingly became detached from the practice of the times, confining it to the realm of archaeology.
For this reason, even after the sixteenth century, those countries that did not intend or were unable to substitute their own new princely and customary law for the law expressed in the laws of Rome remained fundamentally faithful to Bartolism—especially Italy and Germany—and chairs devoted to Bartolist jurisprudence would continue to be spoken of in our universities until the end of the eighteenth century.