The Royal Commission for Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium at the Service of Legal Historians
The Royal Commission for Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium at the Service of Legal Historians

Summary/Abstract: Belgium became independent in 1830. In this constitutional monarchy, legal norms would find their place in a hierarchy of norms of which the constitution formed the pinnacle. In practice, the country renewed only a part of its legal norms. Many sources predating 1830 remained in force. Which ones? Which measures did they include? With the aim of putting these anciennes lois et ordonnances in order, a Royal Decree of 18 April 1846 established a royal Commission for Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium (Commission royale des anciennes lois et ordonnances de Belgique), which was composed of politicians and professors of law faculties. Initially, the Commission was at the service of judicial practice. Its activities were considerably diminished by the First World War and it was only in 1950 that it took up its full range of activities again. At that time, the Commission was invested in exclusively by legal historians, who reoriented it to serve the science of legal history. Since 1846, the Commission has decided to divide the publication of legal texts into three collections: the ordinances, the customaries, and the treaties. In each division, it distinguished between acts regarding the old Netherlands and those regarding the Principalities of Liège, Stavelot, and Bouillon. The volumes concerning Liège, Stavelot, and Bouillon were finished in 1878. The publication of the ordinances of the other territories were organised into three series: (1) the Burgundian period (1381–1506), (2) the Habsburg and Spanish period (1506–1700), and (3) the Austrian period (1700–1794). The series concerning the Austrian period was completed in 1942. For the second series, the ordinances of Philip II are still being dealt with. Work on the first series was only begun in the twentieth century and the editors have reached the period of Philip the Good (who died in 1467). The publication of customaries was divided into thirteen series according to the old principalities of the Southern Netherlands which were situated in the current territory of Belgium. The jurisprudence of the courts of justice that were submitted to the homologation of the Great Council of Malines between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was edited first. Currently, eighty quarto volumes have been published. Two volumes of homologated customaries remain to be published. In the meantime, the Commission has added older documents to its field of action, which allow the following of the evolution of customary law at the end of the Middle Ages. There are, for example, volumes dedicated to appeals to the Parliament of Paris against the Council of Flanders, published starting from Parisian files. The third series has never been started, as the Commission provisionally abandoned the publication of the treaties of the old principalities. The Commission also edits the Bulletin of the Royal Commission for Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium (Bulletin de la Commission royale des anciennes lois et ordonnances de Belgique), which appears sporadically. In this Bulletin, one finds preparatory studies concerning the editing of legal sources and the editions of texts which are too short to merit an entire volume. Without the Bulletin, the entire set of the Commission’s publication consists of about two hundred and fifty quarto volumes and about twenty octavo volumes.

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