Structure and Function of Commentaries in Legal Discourse
A world without commentaries? For German lawyers, this is hardly imaginable. The most important commentaries can be found on every lawyer’s desk, and in practice, the content of legal rules is gathered from the commentary rather than the codes and statutes. In a similar way, the legal world was made of commentaries and reference texts in the view of the European legal scholars of medieval and early modern times. However, academic research has given little consideration to the functions and features of commentaries as media within the legal discourse.
David Kästle-Lamparter examines the “World of Commentaries” from a comparative historical perspective. He analyses how commentaries have become an essential medium of legal discourse in German and European jurisprudence and lays the foundation for a theory of legal commentary.