School of Life: Learned Law and the Scholastic Habitus

Abstract

The origins of the learned law are inextricably interwoven with the origins of the Western university: the school, this peculiar space of ‘studious leisure.’ Despite the early legal academics’ involvement in legal practice and their integration into the environment of the newly flourishing urban space, it is obvious that legal texts produced by ‘learned’ authors also bore the marks of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the ‘scholastic point of view.’ The ‘scholastic point of view,’ Bourdieu has argued, is related to the specific and completely unique quality of thinking that takes place in academic space. Starting from this abstract conceptualization of this ‘scholastic’ condition, the paper focuses on the role of its concrete medieval expression, the phenomenon known as Scholasticism, as a structure that shaped the views of medieval jurists and therefore the character of medieval learned law. Scholasticism, I posit, could be understood not merely as a philosophy or a methodology, but, as Erwin Panofsky put it, as a ‘mental habit’. This (in the words of, again, Bourdieu) habitus grew out of the ‘daily life’ of the academy: academia constituted a ‘world apart’, a particular life-world in which the scholar was completely immersed. In order to illustrate that Scholasticism, thus perceived as habitus, did not only operate on a rational and conscious level, I am eventually highlighting one of the irrational aspects of the discourse of the learned law that can hardly be explained in functional or rational terms: drawing mainly on the works of Umberto Eco, Erwin Panofsky and legal theorists such as Pierre Schlag, I am drawing the attention of the reader to what could be called the legal aesthetics of the Scholastic jurists.

Keywords: Learned Law, Scholasticism, law as university discipline, legal field, academic field, Pierre Bourdieu, legal aesthetics

JEL Classification: K10, K40, K49