Book Review

Comparative/World

In the world of ancient Rome, the forum was the marketplace or public square where individuals conducted judicial and business affairs. All questions concerning the public interest received an airing in the forum before an assembly of citizens. After the fall of Rome, the term forum entered the language of jurisprudence specifically as the place where judicial authority is exercised. During the Middle Ages, the church and secular society developed their own complex and elaborately compartmentalized legal codes and systems. In short, they each had their own forums, and in medieval universities completely separate faculties taught church and secular law. In a book of immense learning and profound insight, Paolo Prodi analyzes the historical process by which the pluralistic legal forums of the West gave way to what he calls "the modern dualism between conscience and the law," or a system in which the traditional layers and compartments of judicial authority have been compressed and transformed into a monolithic secular legal system before which the individual stands alone.

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Prodi, who has written voluminously on institutional and legal history, is primarily concerned in this book with the moral character of the law. Christian values, he argues, have been the primary source of moral illumination for the West's concepts of justice as well as of democracy. He has written his book in a state of high agitation and alarm because the moral basis on which the law rests appears to him to be collapsing. Prodi argues that our modern crisis of values will be the death of the law and democracy itself, if present trends continue. An earlier book, II sacramento del potere (1992), dealt with the moral crisis of democracy; now he is applying the same kind of analysis to a study of the law.

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