‘The Problem of Legal Gaps’

The European legal experience prior to the age of codification was founded on the Civil Law, the jus commune, a body of legal principles stemming from Roman law, rearranged in the Justinian Corpus Juris and constantly interpreted, applied and adapted by a range of jurists (judges and doctors) engaged in a continuous task of law interpretation. In this system, the practically unlimited possibility to use different interpretative techniques—from analogy to extensio regis, from equity, Natural Law, common Reason to lex alii loci—in order to integrate laws in the legal system, made any ideas about the problem of the legal gap pointless.