PART III - IN THE COURTROOM, OR WHAT IS LAW?

Summary

Filing a complaint, involving the court, and producing evidence are one thing. What form the trial takes is another thing altogether. According to what criteria were violations of the norms judged there? According to what principles was justice administered in a particular instance, who participated, and what instruments were used?

These questions were answered clearly and decisively by contemporaries and by large portions of the current research community. Events in court have been characterized since the 1848 legal reforms at the latest by legal equality, legal uniformity and scrutiny of the proceedings guaranteed by public involvement – that was the predominant view expressed in the nineteenth century and that is still to some extent the view in current assessments. Precisely that appraisal is to be put to the test in the following pages, as it – I maintain – idealizes more than it illuminates. According to my first thesis, the appraisal says more about the strong politicization of the legal debates and middle-class discussions of self-understanding at the middle of the nineteenth century than about events in court.