The so-called mos gallicus: In Search of a Transnational History of the “French method of teaching law”

Legal history, as taught in faculties of law, tends to overemphasise the national framework, leading to the knowledge transmission that suffers from old-fashioned nationalistic biases.

To overcome this bottleneck, I will challenge one of the most nationalistic reductions of a major legal phenomenon: the Legal humanism of the Renaissance.

This European intellectual movement, with immense legal and extra-legal repercussions, is still presented today as mainly French, as shown by the expression commonly used to designate it: the mos gallicus jura docendi (French method of teaching law).Understanding the mos gallicus in its original transnational dimension will thus establish the simultaneous development of humanist legal thought from a pan-European perspective and reveal why and how the European Legal humanism has been called the “French method of teaching law”.The aim of this ERC is to demonstrate, by placing the Legal humanism in its European dimension, the construction of legal nationalisms hidden behind the expression mos gallicus.To achieve this, three novel objectives will be pursued: to map the representation of the mos gallicus as it has been shaped by historiography; to determine, through the study of the mos gallicus, how legal nationalisms were shaped since the Renaissance Legal humanism; and to place the mos gallicus in its original European dimension.The ambitious outcomes of this project will be a historiographic database available to the scientific community; papers redefining both mos gallicus and legal nationalism, through the case studies of France and Great Britain; and monographs questioning the relevance of the expression “French method of teaching law”, both on a micro-historical scale by the three doctoral theses, and on a macro-historical scale by the final book.

These works will contribute to really measuring, at a European level, the role played by the Legal humanism in the construction of national legal orders and nation-States.