Heinz Mohnhaupt

This paper examines the history and contemporary practice of the edition of privileges in the context of the term “source of law”. In all legal systems, the term “source of law” has a quality of normative power or of authority for the decision-making processes. In this sense, the research question decides about their property as sources of law.
This raises the question of the content and function of privileges in the history of law. While the individual and special privilegia form a contrast to common law or general legislation as leges privatae, on the other hand, they are also part of the greater category of law and legislation in general. This accounts for their enormous instrumentality in the creation of legal systems. Privileges may extend to all matters of private and public law (economy, trade, invention, jurisdiction, constitution, rights of estates etc.). They have appeared as a mass phenomenon since the Middle Ages. The different characteristics of the sources in turn connote both problems and possibilities for their edition, both in the past and the present. Different forms and functions of their publication and edition can be distinguished for the Ancien Régime. Publications of privileges of estates often served political interests, the publication of private-law privileges, thus, served to protect individual legal positions and their probability in court.
Today, the edition of privileges is determined by the research objectives in European legal history and, in the face of the mass phenomenon of this type of source, is hampered by the problem of criteria for their selection. Editions on the jurisdiction and economic development in the Old Reich have been published in Germany and Austria in recent years (1980, 1981). They attest to the traditional power of privileges and show the important meaning for the ordering and shaping of law up until the 19th century.