«What cannot be theorized must be narrated»: case, fact and event in pre-modern legal culture

This paper aims to highlight the evolution of case law in the history of European continental law. From the comparison of two seventeenth-century legal treatises, we can gain valuable insights. We can discern two distinct visions, ‘mythical and anthropological’, behind the same choice of casuistic method. The first blooms in the dogmatic Roman and Christian legal tradition, striving for a personalized justice, while the second emerges from the nascent rationalist, scientist, and industrial system, aiming for a ‘universal’ ideal. The first, with its salvific connotation and, at the same time, strongly worldly and secular, presupposes the ‘accommodation’ of the interpreter/judge through the interweaving of the circumstances of the fact, and the power to discern and oppose the good/true to the bad/false. The other, in its quest for novel ways to measure facts, yearns for more rigid and formal frame- works which, with a focus on ‘scientific’ truth and predictability, bring meaning and reason (including economic) to social and interpersonal behaviours