Article by Peter Stein
It is a great honor to speak to this distinguished gathering, and I thank you for inviting a legal historian to be your guest. Legal historians do, of course, have opportunities of speaking to other legal historians—and usually any number over three is considered a large crowd—but they are rarely accorded the chance of addressing a wider and more influential audience. I therefore pondered long and hard on how I should best exploit this precious moment. Should I outline my recent researches on the relationship between custom and law in the middle ages, or perhaps introduce my radical views on the origin of the distinction between public and private law in Roman law?
In the end, however, I felt I should sacrifice this chance of propagating my ideas on legal history and say something more relevant to the present occasion, the annual celebration of the Tulane Law Review. The place of law reviews in American legal culture is a subject of perennial fascination to visiting Europeans, since we have nothing like them at home. My own attitudes are inevitably colored by my personal experiences. I first came to the United States thirty years ago as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia—at the invitation of a remarkable Dean, Hardy Cross Dillard, who came from a distinguished New Orleans family. Dean Dillard insisted that all law students at UVA should do at least one cultural course, and he believed that to learn Roman law was a cultural experience.
About the Author
Peter Stein. Emeritus Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge.
Citation
70 Tul. L. Rev. 2675 (1996)