Legal Reform Efforts and the Legal Traditions of the Transylvanian Saxons up to the End of the 16th Century

In 1583, the Transylvanian Saxon community obtained from the Transylvanian prince István Báthory the ratification of its own law book, Eygen-Landrecht. For quarter of a millennium, the law book essentially defined everyday law in this unique community in Transylvania, a multiethnic region that has undergone many constitutional changes. The law book can be seen as a compilation of genetically different legal regulations, containing and combining indigenous legal traditions and legal customs with the “scholarly” law (ius commune) developed by university jurisprudence of Italian origin. The present study describes the Saxons' determined quest for laws in the 15th and 16th centuries, relegating to the background the reception paradigm typical of research on the history of law and relying on the theoretical model of the transfer of legal rules and legal irritants. It examines the external and internal circumstances that impacted the Saxons' attempts at legal renewal, and the number of phases involved. It also investigates the temporal, locally bound, and legal-cultural factors that may have played a role in the success or failure of transfer of legal approaches from abroad, and the extent to which what can be regarded as the traditional law of the Saxons was able to resist attempts at renewal. In the last section of the present paper, examples are given that illustrate the encounter between Germanic legal traditions and the transferred ius commune solutions in the Saxons' law book of 1583, highlighting the durability of certain traditional and typical solutions.