‘Windscheid steht Paulus in nichts nach, und ist dabei für uns viel mehr wert als jener’

Abstract

Summary ‘Windscheid is in no way inferior to Paul, and in this he is worth much more to us than Paul’ – on Stanisław Wróblewski’s treatment of Pandectistics. – In his home country Poland Stanisław Wróblewski (1868–1938) is unanimously numbered among the jurists of the first rank in the extant literature on legal historiography. He is considered to be ‘the Polish Roman lawyer about whom the most has been written’. The admiration for Wróblewski’s scholarly oeuvre among Polish authors even goes as far as that he is often referred to as the ‘Polish Papinian’ in local literature. He is appreciated on the one hand for his expertise as a jurist and, on the other hand, for his mastery of the art of legal thought and argumentation, and finally for the depth of his legal analysis. In the context of this contribution, however, only the question of his relationship to the pandectism, including in particular his relationship to the university teaching of modern Roman law (pandect law), will be examined in more detail. Wróblewski is repeatedly associated with pandectism in legal historical literature. After all, he argued in favour of the continuation of Pandect lectures (pandect law), after the year 1900, i.e. even as the great epoch of pandectism was already drawing to a close. For this purpose, four texts from the years 1894 to 1916, in which Wróblewski explicitly addressed the problem of the relationship to pandectism or to modern Roman law (pandect law), will be analyzed in more detail.