BARTOLISTS. – This is the name given from the 15th century onward to the numerous school of jurists who followed that method of legal study which had already enabled the great Bartolus of Sassoferrato in the 14th century to derive from the sources of the Corpus iuris a new and more modern civil doctrine, and who were at the same time faithful upholders of its validity and of its further development.
The need to adapt law to the real life of peoples undergoing profound renewal in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, and the persistent conviction that the primary foundation of law remained the texts of Justinian’s Compilation—even if supplemented by those of canonists and feudalists as common law for all peoples and all ages—are the motives that drove and guided the bartolists in their work.
However, the correct use of scholastic formulas and procedures, which Bartolus and later Baldo degli Ubaldi and their contemporaries had successfully applied to legal studies, had by the early 15th century yielded its best fruits and was no longer capable of extracting from the texts of the old Roman law those new principles and norms that daily legal practice required. Yet it was precisely this result that the school was meant to achieve, and the jurists, now present in all the vital centers of public and private life, could not detach themselves from the pressing demands of their time.
Thus, for the bartolists, the necessity of defining a law capable of meeting the manifold needs of the new society took precedence over the sound norms of pure scientific speculation: in order to achieve this goal, the scholastic distinctions of the subject under discussion were pushed to the point of fragmenting and even pulverizing it; the deductive logical process of moving from the solution of premises to that of the question often reduced to a dialectical artifice not free from quibbles; the examination of the texts proceeded through minute analyses, the formulation of practical cases, endless series of observations and objections, all in order to find in them the most suitable *intellectus*; the reference to the opinions of others, first and foremost Bartolus himself, became continuous and slavish to the point of often being preferred to the letter of the law itself, and even historical and philological ignorance sometimes served to overcome the difficulties posed by the latter.
Such were the undeniable defects attributed to bartolism even by the early humanists of the 15th century, and for which the learned jurisprudence of the 16th century would explicitly indict the school as having, through long and abstruse disquisitions, exasperating dialectics, the overbearing recourse to *communis opinio*, and errors of history and language, corrupted the purity of Roman laws and obscured the law itself.
But if it is true that the *mos italicus*, as it was called, or bartolist method, suffered from these grave defects, it is also true that from that dialectic, that formalism, and that very obscurity of exposition there usually arose, at least in embryo, that new law which the peoples and the courts demanded; whereas from the literary and historical study of the sources, or *mos gallicus*, introduced and rapidly spread by scholars across Europe, Roman law ended up definitively and increasingly distancing itself from contemporary practice, confining itself to the realm of archaeology.
It is for this reason that, even after the 16th century and despite the influence of the new humanist culture, bartolism remained fundamentally faithful in those countries that either could not or would not replace Roman statutory law with a new princely or customary law of their own—especially Italy and Germany—and that lectures on bartolist doctrine continued to be given in our universities until the end of the 18th century (Giuseppe Ermini).