Jacques Cujas

Jacques Cujas was a French legal scholar of the sixteenth century and the leading figure of the mos gallicus, the humanist school of Roman law study that broke with the medieval commentators. He rejected the layered glosses of Bartolus and Accursius and worked instead from the original Roman texts, recovering their historical context and restoring corrupted passages. His major works, the Observationes et Emendationes and the Paratitla, model this textual and historical method rather than doctrinal argument for legal practice. Teaching mainly at Bourges, Cujas trained a generation of jurists and made the historical-critical study of Roman law a discipline in its own right.