Resurrecting the Law: State Formation and Legal Debates in Nineteenth-Century Greece

This paper discusses the legal debates of 19th century Greece and the attempts to produce a Civil Code following the establishment of the Modern Greek State. The question that Greek legal scholars faced was whether to accept the use of customary law, or to reject it, and if so what laws should replace it. Existing historiography has argued that through the influence of Pavlos Kalligas, the preeminent Greek legal scholar of the 19^thcentury, custom was abandoned in favor of a strict interpretation of Byzantine law. In this paper I examine this debate within the context of European legal developments and the process of codification undertaken throughout Europe from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries, and the ideological and practical implications of the debate.

I argue that despite the belief that the efforts of Kalligas and his cohort led to the elimination of the use of customary law from the Greek judicial system, my research in the archival material of the Appeals Court of Athens indicates that customary law was predominant a generation after the establishment of the Modern Greek State. I conclude that a reexamination of the role and practices of the Greek courts in the 19^th century is much needed as their remarkable flexibility thirty years after the creation of the Greek state is  closer to the flexibility of the courts of the Ottoman period than to the model advocated by the contemporary legal scholars  who demanded a "modern" judicial system to assist the renaissance of the Greek nation.