1825 Civil Code Bicentennial CLE –  The Brendan Brown Lecture – The  Role of Unwritten Laws in the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825: A Historical and Comparative Perspective – Thursday, March 27, 2025

On Thursday, March 27, 2025, Professor Aniceto Masferrer from the law school of the University of Valencia in Spain, delivered the annual Loyola University New Orleans School of Law’s Brendan Brown lecture. This lecture, entitled “The  Role of Unwritten Laws in the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825: A Historical and Comparative Perspective,” was also part of the commemoration of the bicentennial of the 1825 Louisiana Civil Code. Article 21 of the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 stated that “In all civil matters, where there is no express law, the judge is bound to proceed and decide according to equity. To decide equitably, an appeal is to be made to natural law and reason, or received usages, where positive law is silent.” Professor Masferrer reviewed the origins of this provision and explored what judges and practitioners understood by “natural law and usages.”

Professor Aniceto Masferrer is a professor of Legal History and teaches legal history and comparative law at the Faculty of Law, University of Valencia, Spain. He has been a fellow researcher at the Institute Max-Planck for European Legal History, and Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge, at Harvard Law School, at Louisiana State University, and at George Washington University Law School, among other institutions. He has lectured at universities around the world, and is the author of ten books, editor of fourteen, and has written more than one hundred book chapters/articles published in Spanish, European, and American law journals. He has published extensively on criminal law from an historical and comparative perspective, as well as on the codification movement and fundamental rights in the Western legal tradition. He is the Chief Editor of GLOSSAE: European Journal of Legal History and member –and former president– of the European Society for Comparative Legal History (2010-2018).

l-r: SCLAHS Chair E. Phelps Gay, Professor Aniceto Masferrer, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Professor Monica Hof Wallace, Loyola Dean Madeleine Landrieu, Loyola Professor Markus G. Puder