Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.54070/hljk.28.1.6
Crimina Against Sexual Morality in the Legal Compilation of Vrsar: Their Nature in Canon Law and Roman Foundations (Canon Rules as a Source of Statutory Law)
Ivana Jaramaz Reskušić
; Pravni fakultet, Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Ivan Milotić
; Pravni fakultet, Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
This paper, which represents the first part of wider research of the content and legal nature of the legal rules of canon provenance that served as a means for the protection of sexual morality in the legal compilation of Vrsar, focuses on particular criminal offences against sexual morality which were for that territory enacted and published by the Bishop of Poreć, who held sovereignty over Vrsar. The crimina analysed in this paper originated in universal canon law. However, in Vrsar their regimes were not adopted and adapted to the actual needs of a particular community as canon legal rules. Rather, the Bishop of Poreč as the civil sovereign in the territory enacted them as civil rules (i.e. statutory law) and portrayed them as the territory’s own and self-invented criminal offences exclusively belonging to the legal system of Vrsar. In this paper, the authors analyse the relevant crimina. In the first place, they explain the peculiarities of the legal source (the compilation) in which the relevant criminal offences were regulated. The source represents the starting point of this research. Secondly, the authors pay attention to the language and legal drafting of the relevant legal norms and expressions, while the central part of the paper examines individual criminal behaviours against sexual morality in the aforementioned territory. Following an analysis of individual crimina, the authors recognise diverse factors which substantially conditioned the legislator’s specific approach to such behaviours as well as to their specific regulation and to the punishment of people who
committed them. Finally, by using the arguments deriving from the analysis of individual crimes against sexual morality in Vrsar, the authors elaborate on the general approaches and guidelines of the criminal law policy of the Bishop of Poreč whose main purpose was most evidently to afford effective protection of sexual morality in the territory governed by him.
Keywords
Vrsar; canon law; statutory law; sexual morality; criminal offences; legal drafting; woman
Hrčak ID:
269248
URI
Publication date:
14.10.2021.
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