ИСТИНА

For centuries the development of legal order in Western Europe had been defined by entanglement of ius commune and iura propria. Since the late Middle Ages the former provided the framework to conceptualize, to rearrange, to rationalize, to 'scientify' the latter in the course of the so-called reception of Roman (private) law. In this regard Eastern Europe was a different world, largely immune to the reception of Roman law or spread of ius commune. It knew no university education or legal profession. Its private law was largely customary, semi-feudal, hectic and 'local'. Most of these traits contributed to the sense of genuine peculiarity of Russian law until the time of its first comprehensive compilation by count Speransky in the late 1820s. Does all that mean that interaction between local laws and the 'learned law' played no role in the formation of common laws in the wast area of Europe within the Russian empire? To answer this question I intend to investigate the codification of civil laws in the two westernmost regions of the Russian Empire — the Baltic governorates (Estonia, Livonia, Courland) and Poland. In legal terms both regions stood out within the Empire because they enjoyed particular codes of local (regional) laws with some elements of Western European legal tradition. In my view, these regional codifications (Code of civil laws of the Baltic governorates of 1831, its amended draft of 1862, and the 1st book of the Draft Civil Code of Poland of 1865) provided the testing ground and spurred drafting the Civil code of the Russian Empire (since 1882). In particular, these two codifications called for their academic assessment by the leading scholars (Bunge, Pakhman, Muromtsev, Gambarov, Sersenevic, Petrazicki etc.) from the points of view of legal dogmatics and legal politics. It generated vivid debates about the legal and extra-legal (political, social, economic) merits of generalizing or harmonizing laws, the appropriate legal technique and system, the role of local laws. It made legal scholars to draw on Russian and foreign experience and, hence, to engage in the same legal discourse with Western Europe.