Odd Men In: The Fascinating Legal Kinship of Scotland and Louisiana

Conscientious scholarly exploration of a burgeoning family of mixed jurisdictions dates from 1958. Visiting Louisiana law faculties in that year, a Scots law professor, Sir Thomas Brown Smith, urged comparison of Scotland's legal system with that of Louisiana as “a means of overcoming the perils of isolation and steady assimilation by the Common Law." Spurred by Smith's lectures, scholars in time classified over a dozen hybrid systems into a “third legal family,” featuring a blend of civilian and common law influences. The private laws in a number of these jurisdictions (for example, Louisiana, Quebec, and Puerto Rico) were enshrined in a civil code of typically French or Spanish provenance. Although other mixed systems (such as South Africa and Scotland) had no civil code, their legal communities found “proto-codes” in major treatises and institutional writers indebted to Roman law.. . .

Did You Ever Hear of the Napoleonic Code, Stella? A Mixed Jurisdiction Impact Analysis From Louisiana's Law Laboratory

This Article develops the themes of history, language, and culture in the art of mixed jurisdiction impact analysis. It showcases a specific law (former article 177 of the Louisiana Civil Code) governing the liability of the building master for things thrown out of the house into the street or public road. Our case study gives real meaning to the Romanist mixité wrought into Louisiana's civilian core. The reader is not only invited to take a seat on the time machine for a journey through Louisiana's codal triad back to Roman law with stops in Medieval Spanish law and Pre-Napoleonic French law, but also encouraged to reflect on present-day alternatives for construing and applying the law.