Roman-Dutch law

Roman-Dutch law (Dutch: Rooms-Hollands recht, Afrikaans: Romeins-Hollandse reg) is an uncodified, scholarship-driven, and judge-made legal system based on Roman law as applied in the Netherlands in the 17th and 18th centuries. As such, it is a variety of the European continental civil law or ius commune. While Roman-Dutch law was superseded by Napoleonic codal law in the Netherlands proper as early as the beginning of the 19th century, the legal practices and principles of the Roman-Dutch system are still applied actively and passively by the courts in countries that were part of the Dutch colonial empire, or countries which are influenced by former Dutch colonies: Guyana, South Africa (and its neighbours Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), and Zimbabwe), Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Suriname, and the formerly Indonesian-occupied East Timor. It also heavily influenced Scots law.[1] It also had some minor impact on the laws of the American state of New York,[2] especially in introducing the office of Prosecutor (schout-fiscaal).

  1. ^ John W. Cairns, “Importing our Lawyers from Holland: Netherlands Influences on Scots Law and Lawyers in the Eighteenth Century”, in Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994, ed. G. G. Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1996), 136; reprinted in Law, Lawyers, and Humanism: Selected Essays on the History of Scots Law, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
  2. ^ Bielinski, Stefan (April 1979). "The Schout In Rensselaerswijck: Conflict Of Interests". Colonial Albany Social History Project. Retrieved 2011-02-25.