About a Romanization of Testament’s Law in the Lithuanian Statutes

Abstract

There is a great interest in the Polish historiography of law in a Romanization of the Lithuanian Statutes. In the previous years there a few text by S. Godek were published, in which he recapitulated the studies since the beginning of the 19thcentury. The researcher, in his three texts, has made a collection of the articles from roman Institutiones and Lithuanian Statutes which referred to a testament. He did not bring to an end the debate, because there was sometimes not clear about the kind of effect of the Roman law on the Lithuanian Statutes. Analyses of two small fragments which referred to testamenti factio activa show that the effect of the Roman law referred more to the formal aspects, like the construction of a code, than to the reception of norms. The scale of the reception can help by means of the reconstruction of the Lithuanian law at the beginning of the 16th century. This text is only an introduction to this subject.