Legal history of Spain

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Very little is known about the legal history of Spain prior to the arrival of the Romans. In Tartessos around 500 BC the written record of legal sentences is proven. However, a coherent legal history of the legal systems in today's Spain can only be written from the 2nd century BC. The influence of Roman law from the Roman invasion in 206 BC remained a style-defining factor for Spanish law. Until the 5th century after Christ. From Alfonso García-Gallo comes the thesis that “Spanish law has not undergone any profound change since then”. For the integration of Roman law, the conferring of Latin status was of particular importance; the rules of the commercium were thus applied to all inhabitants of today's Spain. With the Constitutio Antoniniana , all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire became Roman citizens, and Spain was thus completely part of the Roman legal cosmos.

The invasion of Germanic peoples in AD 415 led to a political upheaval, but left the further development of Roman law largely unaffected. The political fragmentation of the Iberian Peninsula put an end to the legal unity established by Roman law on the Iberian Peninsula. The meanwhile vulgarized Roman law mixed with Visigoth customary law and canon law. The Codex Euricianus possibly going back to Eurich is an important testimony to the legal history of this epoch.

In the 7th century the political situation changed again with the invasion of the Moors ; For centuries now, Spain was split into two large parts that were legally unrelated. The Christian area was divided into numerous, partly warring kingdoms. At the same time, it was precisely these kingdoms that were least influenced by Roman law. The Muslim law of the Moors had no long-term influence on Spanish legal history. During this phase, however, the unification of the law came to a standstill that would last into the 11th century.

With the emergence of the universities, the 12th century brought with it a renaissance of Justinian Roman law based on its academic rediscovery and processing. In a large part of Europe, and thus also Spain, a ius commune developed whose roots lay in Justinian, canonical, local and feudal law, which had been systematized at the universities. After the beginning of this legal unification, it took almost three centuries until the political unity of Spain through the marriage of Ferdinand II and Isabella I and the expulsion of the Moors in 1492. Political unity soon led to the fact that royal law took precedence over the others local rights were granted. The Castilian law became more and more as the Spanish considered legal.

Legal unification reached its peak in the 18th century. This was due on the one hand to the hegemonic position of Castile conquered by Ferdinand V , on the other hand to the solidifying idea of ​​the king as supreme legislator; Roman law was only granted subsidiary status. The political upheavals at the beginning of the 19th century also led to profound changes of a legal nature within a short period of time. The Cortes of Cadiz from 1810 to 1814 brought the Constitution of Cadiz a constitutional framework liberal - out blank for the first time the competence gave the Parliament to initiate the legislative process - ultimately French inspired. As a result of the interplay between monarchical and democratic, liberal and conservative movements, the image of a French-influenced legal system with codified law, the binding of the judge to the law and subsidiarity of customary law emerges in Spain.

The Second Spanish Republic reformed numerous legal institutions: For the first time there was the possibility of divorce and jury courts were introduced. Women were given the right to vote in 1931 . However, the Spanish Civil War soon thwarted such reforms; the result was an autocratic regime under General Franco that would last forty years. The most radical changes in the Franco regime took place in constitutional law. On the death of Franco in 1975 followed the process transición , d. H. the transformation of an autocratic into a democratic constitutional system. The most important step in this was the 1978 constitution. Among other things, the right to vote for women , which could not be exercised during the Franco regime, was renewed. In other areas of law, the break had been far less radical since Franco; accordingly, Spanish law as a whole is to be viewed as the result of a continuous development of 1,600 years.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Iván C. Ibán: Introduction to Spanish Law . Nomos, Baden-Baden 1995.
  2. ↑ a b Jad Adams: Women and the Vote. A world history. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-870684-7 , page 441