Criminal Law in Lex Baiuvariorum
Criminal Law in Lex Baiuvariorum

Summary/Abstract: With respect to early medieval German law, the concept of ‘criminal law’ should be handled cautiously as the Volksrechte do not contain any principle to distinguish criminal law – or public law – from private law. At the same time, early medieval folk laws basically and clearly show the traces of ‘punitive’ lawmaking, to be more precise, compilation. Therefore, all efforts to systematise this field of law more or less interpret past phenomena in terms of our present approach to law as a system because all that we mean by criminal law needs to be discerned and systematised from various provisions lacking any principle and theoretical demand scattered in diverse codes.Making this clear at the outset, this paper attempts to present the criminal law of early medieval Bavarian (folk) law, Lex Baiuvariorum as a system. First, it will try to create the chapter of ‘general provisions’ discerned from the passages of the code in accordance with the present system of criminal law; after that, it will develop the chapter of ‘special provisions’ setting out from specific states of facts systematised in terms of the protected legal object; finally, it will investigate the system of sanctions of Lex Baiuvariorum.

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