Roman Law, Commercial Law and Levin Goldschmidt’s Legacy

In 1897, a few months after Levin Goldschmidt’s death, Ercole Vidari, the chair of commercial law at the University of Pavia for 45 years (1863-1908), defined him “il principe dei commercialisti moderni di ogni paese”. Some years later, in 1904, William Mitchell, publishing in Cambridge his Essay on the Early History of the Law Merchant, wrote: “My debt to previous writers (...) and above all Goldschmidt - is evident in every page”. In 1935, Guido Astuti, destined to become one of the leading Italian legal historians until his death in 1980, in reviewing the passionate defense of Goldschmidt’s legacy written by his scholar Wilhelm Silberschmidt, defined Goldschmidt’s best known work - the Universalgeschichte des Handelsrechts (1891) -, a matchless model of legal-historical studies. In 1998, Albrecht Cordes, the chair of medieval and modern legal history at the University of Frankfurt am Main, writing about late medieval company law within the framework of the Henseatic League, had to admit that Goldschmidt’s “universalist” program was still influential. It is a matter of fact that Levin Goldschmidt’s work has been for the whole 20th century the unavoidable starting point of any research in commercial law history well beyond the boundaries of Germany. This seems to be true even today. The aim of this paper is to analyze the role played by Levin Goldschmidt in the establishment of commercial law as an autonomous field of study and legislation, as well as the importance he gave to the history of commercial law, with a particular focus on his personal interpretation of the Roman law legacy.