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Порталус

Law, Russian (Muscovite), 1300-1500

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Muscovy →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190296519


Sources of the Law

The bulk of the extant legal texts of early Muscovy survive in complex clerical collections that came to be known as the Kormchaya kniga (Pilot's book). Borrowing most of its contents from Byzantine nomocanons, the Kormchaya kniga consisted of the canons of the ecumenical and local church councils, canons of notables in the church, and numerous secular Byzantine codes like the Eclogue and Procheiros nomos. Along with miscellaneous Byzantine texts, the Kormchaya also preserved the basic text of medieval Russian law--the Russkaya pravda (Russian truth).

The Russkaya pravda is generally believed to have originated at some point in the eleventh century; subsequently it was revised and supplemented, perhaps in the twelfth century. In this form the Pravda survives in two fundamental redactions--Short and Expanded. The Short Pravda bears several indications that it was used in Russia in the eleventh century during the reigns of Yaroslav the Wise (grand prince of Kiev during the period 1019-1054) and his sons, but it is extant only in two fifteenth-century copies of chronicles and in a number of much later copies.

The Expanded Pravda, on the other hand, is extant in nearly 100 copies, the oldest of which is included in the oldest Kormchaya kniga (1282) of the so-called Russian redaction. Likewise, most of the other medieval copies--the majority of them date from the fifteenth century--are known to us by their inclusion in copies of the Kormchaya. The Expanded redaction of the Russkaya pravda is approximately three times longer than its shorter counterpart and contains much detail on matters of substantive and procedural law untouched in the Short Pravda. That the Expanded Pravda springs from the twelfth century seems certain because it mentions Vladimir Vsevolodich Monomakh, who was grand prince of Kiev from 1113 to 1125.

The repeated copying of the Pravda in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and even sixteenth century introduced some minor changes in the law, but on balance the medieval scribes seem to have regarded the Pravda as a continuing source of law. One significant revision was carried out perhaps as early as the end of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century. As a result of severe condensation, the copyists in Muscovy produced the so-called Abbreviated Pravda, a text that harmonizes rather well with Muscovy's own legislation.

While the Russkaya pravda enjoyed distribution throughout all the territories of medieval Russia, several local centers also produced codifications of their own law. The medieval town of Novgorod had its own statutes, which in time were joined in a Judicial Charter. Only a fragment of the Charter survives, and it comes from a single copy of late origin (ca. 1471). But the harmony of its contents with some of the Russkaya pravda's regulations and the clues provided by the Charter's text suggest that the Charter probably was used in Novgorod at least by the end of the fourteenth century. Pskov, too, left a Judicial Charter; it is extant in a single complete copy of late provenance (late sixteenth to early seventeenth century), and in addition, its last twelve articles survive in a separate manuscript. Since Pskov was really part of Novgorod's administrative system for much of the late medieval period, it seems likely that many of the regulations extant in the Pskov Charter had parallels in Novgorod's law.

Legal texts from Smolensk confirm that the norms of Russkaya pravda continued to have weight in the west Russian territories at least through the thirteenth century. Smolensk, like Novgorod and Pskov, came into contact with European traders, and Smolensk law itself was preserved in Latin copies from the city of Riga and the trading island of Gotland.

The establishment of a new legal order was the work of the Muscovite princes Ivan III (1462-1505) and Ivan IV (1547-1584). Several regulations governing territories within Muscovy appeared in the course of the fifteenth century, but no Muscovite code antedates the Sudebnik of 1497. It too is preserved in a single copy, which has been dated to a time very close to 1500. Essentially a schedule of fees for the prince's judicial administration and a description of various judicial documents, the 1497 Sudebnik contains relatively little substantive law. This has encouraged speculation that the Russkaya pravda and other customary norms continued to have the force of law in the overwhelmingly agrarian society of early Muscovy, especially since it was precisely at the time of the promulgation of the Sudebnik that the copying of Pravda reached record dimensions.

With the publication of the 1550 Sudebnik, Muscovite law had solidified and procedure as well as substantive law was rewritten to accommodate the needs of the state, now successfully centralized. Not until the seventeenth-century Muscovite sovereigns undertook major revisions did the law undergo any alteration in principle.

Church law too experienced significant growth in the late medieval period. The first of the Russian redactions of the Kormchaya kniga dates from the late thirteenth century, and the collection underwent several revisions in the succeeding three centuries. In addition, several legal texts for churchmen appeared in the fourteenth century. The Merilo pravednoe (Just measure) seems to have been composed for the Metropolitan's own court. This bulky composition--each of the five extant copies numbers several hundred folios--consisted of two parts. The first section contained exhortatory texts addressed to judges to ensure that justice would indeed prevail. The second section includes several legal texts, including the Expanded Russkaya pravda, church statutes, extracts from the Procheiros nomos and Mosaic law, several novels of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, and numerous other texts.

One of the codes included in the Merilo pravednoe was the Zakon sudnyi liudem (Court law for the people), a revision of the eighth-century Eclogue adjusted to meet the needs of Slavic society. The Zakon is preserved in two fundamental redactions--Short and Expanded. All of the copies of both redactions are extant only in medieval Russian manuscripts. It is certain that the Expanded redaction originated somewhere in Russia, perhaps in Novgorod in the thirteenth century, but the Short redaction almost certainly was compiled outside the Russian lands. There are several viewpoints associated with different national groups, but the lexicon of the Short redaction seems to indicate that this code was compiled for the West Slavs sometime around the turn of the ninth century.

Both redactions contain regulations addressed to questions of testimony and delicts associated especially with agriculture. The harsh sanctions of the Eclogue's seventeenth title (normally several kinds of mutilation), from which much of the Zakon sudnyi was borrowed, are replaced in the Slavic reworking with clerical penances. The Expanded redaction maintains this distinction but further adjusts the code's regulations to conform to medieval Russian practice.

Another church text of the fourteenth century was the first in early Muscovy to prescribe afflictive sanctions. The Pravosudie mitropoliche (Metropolitan's justice) represents a kind of amalgam of local precedent and severe sanctions. It prescribes penalties like decapitation for homicide and makes provision for documents of litigation; it is perhaps the first of Russia's texts to include consideration of transcripts.

Church guarantees also flourished in the early Muscovite period. Churchmen, like many private landlords, enjoyed varying degrees of judicial immunity into the sixteenth century. Special guarantees for clerical immunity from secular prosecution were built into a series of compacts that bear the names of well-known medieval princes. Vladimir's Statute, ascribed to the tenth-century prince Vladimir Sviato-slavich (980-1015), who forcibly converted his subjects to Orthodoxy, included guarantees that no cleric would be subject to any secular court, and that certain offenses--principally offenses against marriage and morality--would be judged exclusively by churchmen. Yaroslav's Statute, ascribed to Vladimir's son, Yaroslav the Wise, who is also mentioned in the Russkaya pravda, listed specific cases over which clerical courts held jurisdiction and prescribed penances and fines to be paid into the church's treasuries. Both documents survive only in late copies. The oldest copy of Vladimir's Statute belongs to the fourteenth century and the oldest copy of Yaroslav's Statute is fifteenth-century, so that critics have long maintained that neither statute originated with the prince whose name it bears. What is indisputable is that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these texts enjoyed wide currency among both clergy and laity. Extant Muscovite documents demonstrate that early in the fifteenth century and again in the sixteenth century, Muscovy's secular rulers reaffirmed the right of the church to immunity from secular jurisdiction for its own personnel and the exclusive right to adjudicate crimes of morality.


Procedure

Presumably, therefore, two separate court systems were in action in the early centuries of Muscovy's history. Neither secular nor clerical courts, however, have left satisfactory records of actual trials with which one might reconstruct court practice. The codes must serve instead.

The Russkaya pravda nowhere describes a trial as such. Rather, like the so-called barbarian codes of the European West, the Pravda describes a process of private prosecution. Homicides were liable to revenge, at least until sometime in the eleventh century, when composition (a compensation payment of money) was prescribed. Discovery of theft initiated a public announcement to that effect, whereupon the possessor of the stolen property was expected to return the goods in question within three days. If he himself was not the thief, then he was to assist in a series of regressing interrogations until the thief was discovered. Catching the thief in the act allowed the victim to settle the matter on the spot, and everyone in the community was obliged to assist in the hot pursuit of thieves. Failure to join the posse invited charges of complicity, and the law broadened responsibility for repayment to include those who would not take part in the chase. Assault cases fell under similar regulations. Initially talion ruled, but the Pravda came to detail a series of financial remedies for almost any conceivable offense.

None of this involved any third party. Only the victim and offender (together with their kin) were expected to take any part in litigation. Neither redaction of the Pravda even mentions a judge, and no regulations governing court appearances or procedure are included. Even pleas of innocence are absent, since the Pravda left all these matters to the community's own judgment.

The inattention of the Pravda to matters of trial and procedure contrasts strongly with the content of later legal codes. The Novgorod Judicial Charter begins with a call to judges to execute their task without regard for the social or financial station of litigants. The code continues by outlining courts of the Novgorod archbishop, the mayor, the prince's assistants, and the town official charged with presiding over commercial suits (tysiatskii). Novgorod's courts required various forms of documents in order to further prosecution, and unruly partisans were specifically banned.

Procedure also demanded several ceremonial acts that, the Charter's compilers hoped, would guarantee the integrity of the outcome of the suit. All litigants were expected to kiss the cross as a proof of their honesty. Evidence was of three kinds: documentary, testimonial, and results of ordeal. Novgorod law expressed special preference for documentary evidence, and guaranteed that any suitor who provided appropriate documentary proof when his opposite did not would win the case. To that end each judicial decision was written up, affixed with an authenticating seal, and handed over to the winning suitor to use as proof of his claim in any subsequent litigation. Witnesses were also heard in court, but they seem not to have testified to questions of fact. Rather they were witnesses of reputation, as their name (poslukh) indicates. At any rate, the Novgorod Charter relates few specifics governing testimony except to rule out testimony from foreigners and slaves.

Evidently some form of ordeal was practiced even in early Russian society. Although the Russkaya pravda makes no specific provision for its use, the iron ordeal is recalled in one article of the Expanded Pravda, in which the code lists fees paid to officials who administered the ordeal. Novgorod law, at least as it survives, does not mention the iron ordeal or any of its parallels. Consequently, the ordeal seems to have been relegated to a subsidiary function in Novgorod law, where documentary evidence and, to a lesser extent, testimony provided the main proofs.

The Pskov Judicial Charter also begins with an enumeration of Pskov's courts and calls upon judges to render decisions without consideration of friendship or vengeance. As in Novgorod, clerical courts operated side by side with courts of the town mayor and the prince's assistants, and the Pskov Charter makes special mention of the judges' duty to consult the law in coming to their decisions.

Again procedure was governed primarily by documentary evidence. Winning litigants received official records of their victory, and a copy of the trial record was deposited in the town archives. Consequently unofficial documents, presumably those without authenticating seals and for which no copy existed in the town archives of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, were not recognized in court. Introducing them brought the litigant no satisfaction and merely obliged the court to offer the plaintiff his choice of ordeals--kissing the cross, taking the oath, or engaging in the duel. Wager of law decided the matter.

Witnesses too played a part in Pskov, but again their role seems to have been limited to questions of the litigant's repute. Land suits, for example, could be decided by the squatter asking his neighbors to come to court in his behalf to attest to his veracity in claiming long-time tenancy. The Charter does not quite ask them the facts of the case, and indeed other provisions make clear that witnesses had no role in deciding questions of fact. Complaints of assault could include reference to witnesses, but the judge only asked where the victim spent the night. It remained for the victim himself to describe the conditions of the attack, and declare before whom he had announced his complaint. Finally witnesses were summoned to determine if in fact the victim had, as he said, announced his assault to them. Witnesses were expected to parrot the complainant's charge exactly, but they were never asked the circumstances of the assault. Even if the witness exactly matched the litigant's charge, nothing was proved. It remained for the victim and the accused to do battle or engage in some other form of ordeal.

Use of ordeals to determine the outcome of litigation in Pskov was evidently well established. The duel was prescribed in more than a dozen cases, and the deciding oath and the risk of kissing the cross were assigned even more frequently. The popularity of ordeals in the law very likely was due to the inexperience of Pskov's citizens in dealing with written guarantees. Simple theft cases continued to be resolved as before, by means of the bald announcement of one's loss and the expectation of the prompt return of the stolen property. Failing that, the accused had to produce the person from whom he had acquired the stolen goods. Should memory fail him, he was allowed to purge himself with a simple oath, on the assumption that he already enjoyed a good reputation in Pskov.

In short, the law of both Pskov and Novgorod continued many of the procedural forms known to the Russkaya pravda. New were the specific provision for trials, and the confidence in written quarantees. Muscovy's elaboration of these principles was to result in a significant change in the law. Primarily, the law codes of 1497 and 1550 extended the range within which documentary evidence was accepted. As in Pskov and Novgorod, court records were admissible, but Muscovy also took cognizance of other forms of documentation unknown to previous justices. The surviving spate of court records from land litigation that took place late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth century demonstrates that witnesses could introduce various documents to support their claims. Immunity charters, cadastral records, gift documents, testaments, and other written instruments were often introduced as proof of ownership. Not infrequently the judges recorded their preference for documentary evidence and noted its role in deciding the case.

Nevertheless, testimony too played a significant role in a society that was still overwhelmingly illiterate. Again Muscovy's law introduced a significant advance in detailing what kind of testimony was acceptable: witnesses (svideteli) were obliged to relate only that which they had seen. The 1497 code, which introduced this prescription into trial testimony, did not produce immediate changes in the traditional character of testimony, if one is to judge from the extant cases. But plainly the significance of demanding eyewitness testimony was clear to Muscovy's jurists, because the succeeding code, the 1550 Sudebnik, reproduced the demand for eyewitness testimony and ridiculed hearsay evidence.

It is difficult to determine precisely the source of Muscovy's changed view of testimony, but it now seems likely that churchmen were influential in effecting the new requirements. Not only did documents like the Merilo pravednoe detail rigorous examination of witnesses, but several texts extant in copies from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reproduce Byzantine legislation on testimony. Most important is a work entitled "On Witnesses," which is included in at least two sixteenth-century miscellanies. It was extracted from the Procheiros nomos and edited for local consumption, but it stands out by virtue of both its contrast with early Muscovite practice and its similarity with the demands of the new Muscovite codes.

Nevertheless, ordeals continued to have an important place in Muscovite procedure. The codes detail all the fees payable in the event of a duel, and while some modern commentators doubt the application of the wager of law, Baron Sigismund von Herberstein (who visited Muscovy early in the sixteenth century) provides a complete description of a duel he seems to have witnessed. Other forms of ordeal also continued in practice. Surviving case records indicate that litigants were expected to agree to submit their case to decision by kissing the cross (a form of oath), casting of lots, or judicial duel. It may be, as some transcripts suggest, that all these forms of the law's wage were simply formulaic, routine parts of litigation without which the litigant had no hope of a successful outcome. On the other hand, it is clear that irrational modes of proof were declining in number, and with the rise of detailed regulations governing testimony the fate of ordeals was sealed.


Criminal Law

Criminal law too underwent dramatic change in the interval between the composition of the Russkaya pravda and the publication of the 1497 Sudebnik. In early medieval Russian law, there was no distinction between criminal and civil law. All offenses were simple torts, and appropriate restitution was specified. The Russkaya pravda itself documents the earliest history of talion (retaliatory) justice. Both the Short and Expanded redactions of the Pravda begin with a provision that sanctioned revenge for homicide. The law imposed limits upon those eligible to avenge the homicide, and it may be that identification of specific kin who might press for revenge represents the very first step in restricting talion. Nevertheless, only in cases where there was no one to seek vengeance was composition for homicide acceptable.

Sometime late in the eleventh century revenge was removed from the list of acceptable legal satisfactions, and composition replaced it. Homicides henceforth were to be compensated according to a prescribed schedule in which the prince's servitors were protected by a bloodwite (a fine to the ruler) as well as a wergild (compensation to the family). Homicides of ordinary free men called for payment of the wergild, which in reduced size also applied to women, slaves, and various categories of dependents. Other offenses also were subject to composition. Assault, slander, and all categories of theft each had a fixed rate of restitution by which the victim was to be compensated.

Consequently, the Russkaya pravda provides little evidence of any distinction between civil and criminal law. All offenses were conceptualized as simple torts, and detailed schedules of compensation provided a framework within which all disputes could be settled. Only the barest glimpse of afflictive sanctions is visible in the Pravda. In one article in the Expanded Russkaya pravda there is a single provision which seems to indicate that in the event of a homicide that had no provocation, the offender and his family could be subjected to physical punishment. Parallel readings in the various copies of the redaction indicate that the medieval copyists did not very well understand the code's provisions in this matter, so it may be doubted that any of the medieval princes had occasion to apply the sanction. More credible is the hint in the Russkaya pravda that in addition to the wergild payable in cases of homicide the prince came to expect the bloodwite as well. Certainly the prince extracted payment in the event of the homicide of any of his servitors, but precisely how the bloodwite was generalized to the larger population is not clear. All that is certain is that already sometime in the eleventh century there was an official of the prince's administration charged with collecting the bloodwite, and in time the princes succeeded in extending application of the homicide sanction beyond the narrow confines of the princely circles.

Finally, the Expanded Russkaya pravda unmistakably initiated the practice of punishing various offenses by financial sanction. Indeed, often the compensation figure remained identical to its parallel in the Short Pravda, but it prescribed a fine (payable to the state or the judge) instead of composition (payable to the victim or the family). In this way officials of the prince's judiciary gradually succeeded in converting the law into an instrument of centralized social control.

The criminal law of the Novgorod and Pskov Judicial Charters gives some sign of moving still further away from notions of tort. Pskov law clearly stipulated execution for a series of crimes--horse theft, arson, recidivist theft, and so on--but only called for the collection of the bloodwite in cases of homicide. It may be that the customary composition payments were also at work here, but the code's compilers simply omitted mention of the obvious. Certainly much of the Pskov Judicial Charter recalls the composition schedules of the Russkaya pravda. Theft of various forms of livestock, for example, brought the victim composition just as it did in the Pravda. The Novgorod Charter provides less information on criminal law, probably because only a fragment of the Charter survives. Nevertheless, from what remains it is clear that in Novgorod too the courts were increasingly inclined to separate criminal infractions from civil loss. Land litigation, for example, could lead to heavy financial fines for the losing party convicted of forcible seizure of property.

Muscovite law brings to fruition the long drive toward isolating criminal law from civil law. Undoubtedly the legal precedents of Pskov and Novgorod were in the minds of the compilers of the 1497 Sudebnik when they examined questions of criminal offense. Repetition of theft would lead to execution, just as homicides, church thieves, arsonists, traitors, and all "notorious" criminals were dispatched immediately for execution. False accusation too was to be punished by execution, but inasmuch as the Sudebnik authorized torture to extract confessions from the accused, one may question the utility of the code's suspicion of slanderous accusation.

Whether any executions ever took place is unknown, since no records of criminal litigation survive. Certainly the updating of Muscovite law that took place in 1550 built upon the provisions included in the 1497 code, so that at least the formal conception of criminal law in early Muscovy remained fixed. Compensation continued to be active, however, although in slightly different circumstances. Muscovite victims might well earn damages for injury done to their honor in the event of false accusation. But only in this one area did the 1550 code introduce any substantial additions to the corpus of criminal law.


Civil Law

While the gradual differentiation of criminal law from the rest of the law did indeed take place in medieval Russia, the growth of a body of civil law was irregular. The Short Pravda contains no regulations whatsoever that might qualify as civil law, and the Expanded Pravda offers only slightly more attention to this part of the law. The Pravda introduced an important concept in limiting liability for disaster beyond the control of the contracting party, and the provision was repeated in close rewording in the 1497 Sudebnik. Litigation over loans, storage contracts, and acceptable levels of usury are the subject of several provisions enacted probably sometime in the twelfth century, but as noted above, in principle civil law remained indistinguishable from criminal.

The Expanded redaction of the Russkaya pravda also devoted considerable space to inheritance law. The regulations govern not so much inheritance as they do rights of survivorship, inasmuch as they pay no attention to the instruments of inheritance, and examine instead forms of natural succession. Escheat, widow's bench, ultimogeniture, and complications caused by succession when two or more marriages are involved all find consideration. Also of relevance to the development of civil law in medieval Russia is the Pravda's large codex on slavery. The statute defines the various types of slavery, conditions of enslavement, and a slave's legal responsibility. Both the inheritance and slavery sections probably continued to have legal weight in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Muscovy, inasmuch as no significant corrections were introduced into Muscovite law on these matters. Quite the contrary, it was precisely in this interval that Muscovite copyists were reproducing the Expanded Pravda in record quantities, and as scholars of Muscovite slavery have noted, these copyists did update the Pravda's slavery law, but their work indicates only minimal changes in the law.

Since both Novgorod and Pskov were very much involved in medieval trade, it seems reasonable to assume that civil law was significant in both towns. In fact, the surviving part of the Novgorod Charter gives no evidence of an interest in commercial law. Slavery, inheritance, debt resolution, and all other matters treated in the Pravda do not surface in the Novgorod code. Pskov, however, which borrowed much of its political organization and judicial content from its mother-city, Novgorod, does produce a few statutes on these themes. Storage contracts and procedures governing loans are spelled out in considerable detail, specifying acceptable limits for evidence of default of contractual obligations. The Pskov Charter also defines the relations between hired artisan and his employer, between agricultural tenant and landlord, and between apprentice and master. Succession too occupies a significant place in the Pskov code, and reproduces some of the fundamental provisions of the Pravda. Pskov also recognized the widow's bench, although ultimogeniture seems not to have been practiced in Pskov. The code is not specific on this point but does make the elder brother responsible for the deceased father's debts, although repayment evidently was made from lands inherited jointly by the sons.

Muscovite law paid attention only to those matters already well developed in the civil law of both Novgorod and Pskov. Land litigation was at the heart of the civil law provisions of the Sudebnik, but Muscovy's regulations clearly stemmed from procedures already worked out in the northwestern city-republics. After repeating the Pravda's defense of merchants ruined by matters beyond their control, and after defining in brief the forms and means of enslavement and manumission, the Sudebnik devotes a single article each to relations between hired labor and employer, interstate succession, and rights of peasants to move (in reality, this represented a constriction of peasant rights and the foundation of serfdom). The Sudebnik also examined details of land litigation. The code determined where fences were acceptable, allowed protection of boundary markers, and described the means and limits of litigation over land.

In other respects, however, Muscovite jurists made no noticeable attempt to enlarge the corpus of civil law bequeathed them by the Russkaya pravda or the Novgorod and Pskov Judicial Charters. Even the 1550 Sudebnik only amplified upon the relatively terse statements of civil law contained in the 1497 code.


Summary

Medieval Russian law underwent significant, though uneven, growth. Criminal law, virtually indistinguishable from civil law in the earliest codes, came to constitute a separate jurisdiction in which an entirely distinct notion of penalty emerged well before 1500. Procedure too underwent dramatic change. Muscovy's fully staffed courts--judges, secretaries, seal-keepers, bailiffs and clerks--contrast vividly with the informal adjudication described in the Russkaya pravda, according to which the citizen himself prosecuted his case. Indeed, even vengeance justice seems to have passed from the realm of legal remedy only sometime late in the eleventh century. Testimony, at first primarily simple reputation and attestation testimony, gradually came to be eyewitness testimony directed to questions of fact. Written proofs, unmentioned in the Russkaya pravda, came to constitute the final and deciding evidence in Muscovy's litigation over land.

Consequently, while it is not possible to identify early Muscovite law with modern legal notions, some fundamental steps toward rationalizing the law had already been taken by 1500.


-- Daniel H. Kaiser


FURTHER READINGS


General bibliographies on Russian law that treat Muscovite law include William E. Butler, Russian and Soviet Law (1976); Marc Szeftel, "Russia (Before 1917)," in John Gilissen, ed., Bibliographical Introduction to Legal History and Ethnology, D/9 (1966).

Translations into English are: George Vernadsky, Medieval Russian Laws (1947, repr. 1965), which includes the Russkaya pravda and the Pskov and Novgorod Judicial Charters; Horace W. Dewey, Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488-1556 (1966), which includes both Muscovite Sudebniki, idem and Ann M. Kleimola, trans., Russian Private Law in the XIV-XVII Centuries (1973), and Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem (Court Law for the People) (1977).

See also Daniel H. Kaiser, The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (1980), summarized in "Modernization in Old Russian Law," in Russian History, 6 (1979); Ann M. Kleimola, Justice in Medieval Russia: Muscovite Judgment Charters (Pravye Gramoty) of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1975).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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