Medieval Church Law And The Origins Of The Western Legal Tradition A Tribute To Kenneth Pennington |best| Today

Kenneth Pennington, the Kelly-Quinn Professor Emeritus at The Catholic University of America , is a towering figure in medieval legal history.

In his essays collected in The Long Shadow of the Ius Commune , Pennington shows how these procedural rights migrated from ecclesiastical courts into secular courts, and eventually into the American Bill of Rights. The right to counsel, the privilege against self-incrimination (rooted in canonist prohibitions of forcing a cleric to take an oath de veritate dicenda ), and the rule of double jeopardy all have medieval canonist fingerprints. : Ideas about the limitation of a prince's

: Ideas about the limitation of a prince's power and the rights of subjects were explored deeply in Pennington’s own research, particularly in his work The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600 . Kenneth Pennington’s Scholarly Legacy , providing an exhaustive survey of how the

For centuries, the common narrative of Western legal history began in ancient Rome, jumped to the English common law of Henry II, and landed squarely in the Enlightenment. In this truncated story, the thousand years in between—the so-called "Dark Ages"—were little more than a feudal fog of brute force and primitive custom. : Ideas about the limitation of a prince's

, providing an exhaustive survey of how the medieval church’s legal innovations eventually transitioned into the secular "Western legal tradition". specific legal concept