Pro Memorie - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2024

Around 1500, just like other sovereigns in Europe, the higher authorities in the Habsburg Netherlands immediately used the printing press in the context of legal and political communication, for example to promulgate laws and statutes. Moreover, their visual aspect played an essential role in their dissemination, as many editions contain woodcuts with princely emblems and/or portraits. Because producing woodcuts was a labourintensive and costly process, printers reused woodblocks from other books, also in legislation. For example, Willem Vorsterman reused portraits of sovereigns he commissioned for his Excellente cronike van Vlaenderen (Antwerp, 1531) in his editions of ordinances. This contribution showcases illustrated ordinances issued in the county of Holland-Zeeland (1500-1540) and traces the origin of reused woodcuts in other texts. Were these portraits purely meant as political communication by the sovereign or was using this particular kind of woodcuts an invention of book printers to promote a new genre?

Customary law, the unwritten mores of a populace, has a long tradition next to written law. Reception of Roman law, appearance of codified law and positivist methodologies have manoeuvred custom to the margins of the law as it stands, at least in the Netherlands, at the edge of the world. It should be taken seriously, however. The Decisiones of Willem Radelant, president of the Court of Utrecht, are a treasure trove in learned reasoning, and reveal customs growing from facts into accepted law, on the basis of formal criteria (mos, populus, tempus, ratio and aequitas). In Radelants reasoning the acceptance or denial of custom is remarkably oriented on the facts of the case, soundly distinguishing the specific from the general; it provides a systematic place for unwritten rule and decision, between the written signposts of Roman, Canon, feudal and local statutory rules and principles. It does not hesitate either to conditionally give primacy to custom over written law. It is thus a scholarly tale in practical decision-making, with mind and heart, on soft law in hard times.

The main roles in this article are for Harry van Cranenburgh (1915-1991) and Henk van der Heijden (1916-2012). They were students in Leiden in the decade before World War II. The author is searching for an answer on the question: which ideals and ideas cherished these young lawyers? It looks as they were convinced that the Dutch legal science had come to an end.

In the late 20th-century Netherlands, two peculiar types of Dutch rights in rem dating from medieval times were abolished. These two types of customary rights had different characters and different local origins. What they had in common was that in their final years, they hampered economic progress and became increasingly burdensome in socio-economic respect. This article analyses and compares the social and administrative pathways to abolition from both a legal historical and agenda-building perspective.