BARTOLISTI. - This is the appellation given from the 15th century onward to the numerous host of jurists who followed that method of studying law which had already enabled the great Bartolus of Sassoferrato in the 14th century to draw from the sources of the Corpus iuris the new, more modern civil-law doctrine, and who were at the same time faithful assertors of the soundness of that doctrine and of its further developments.
The need to adapt law to the real life of peoples in a phase of profound renewal in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era, and the ever-persistent conviction that the primary foundation of law itself remained always the texts of the Justinianic Compilation — albeit integrated by canonistic and feudal ones — as the common law for all peoples of all epochs, are the motives that impel and guide the Bartolists in their work.
Yet the correct use of scholastic formulas and procedures, which Bartolus and then Baldus de Ubaldis and their contemporaries had successfully applied to legal studies, had by the early 15th century already yielded its best fruits, nor did it any longer appear capable of still discovering in the texts of the old Roman law those new principles and those new norms that legal practice daily required. And yet it was the school's chief task to reach such a result, nor was it permissible for the doctors, now present in every sinew of public and private life, to hold themselves aloof in any way from the inescapable demands of their times.
Thus the necessity of defining the law aimed at satisfying the manifold needs of the new society takes precedence, for the Bartolists, over the sound norms of pure scientific speculation: in order to achieve their aim, the scholastic distinctions of the topic under treatment come to mince and even to pulverize the latter; the logical-deductive process for ascending from the solution of the premises to that of the question is often reduced to a dialectical artifice not immune from quibbles; the examination of the texts unfolds through minute analyses, formulations of practical cases, interminable series of observations and objections in order finally to find in them the most suitable intellectus; the reference to the opinions of others, first and foremost those of Bartolus, becomes continuous and slavish to the point of often being placed before the very letter of the law, and even historical and philological ignorance sometimes serves to overcome the difficulties posed by the latter.
Such are the undeniable defects reproached against Bartolism already by the first humanists of the 15th century and on account of which the cultivated jurisprudence of the 16th century will explicitly indict the school, as of those who with long abstruse disquisitions, with exasperating dialectic, with the relentless recourse to the communis opinio, with errors of history and language, had corrupted the purity of the Roman laws and rendered the law obscure.
But if it is true that the mos italicus, as it was called, or Bartolist method, was guilty of those grave defects, it is equally true that from that dialectic, from that formalism, from that very nebulousness of exposition there usually arose for it at least the first germ of that new law which the populations and the tribunals demanded; whereas from the literary and historical study of the sources, or mos gallicus, established and rapidly diffused by the cultivated jurists in Europe, Roman law ended up by withdrawing definitively and ever more from the practice of the times, confining it to archaeology.
It is for this reason that those countries which do not intend, or cannot, replace the law expressed in the laws of Rome with a new princely and customary law of their own — especially Italy and Germany — remain fundamentally faithful to Bartolism, albeit duly influenced by the new humanistic culture, even after the 16th century, and that Bartolist chairs continued to be spoken of in our universities until the fall of the 18th century.