328 CODIFYING RUSSIAN LAWtheir training from Savigny's assistant and pupils. It meant, of course,
that the first Russian jurists - Nevolin, Redkin, Blagoveshchenskii,
Kunitsin - were trained in the spirit of the historical school. In this
manner the codification led to the establishment of jurisprudence and
the history of law as academic disciplines in Russia. 1
Another important by-product was the codification of local customary
law. Speransky and his assistants learned soon that several provinces of
the Empire (even if Poland and Finland were excluded) had legal
traditions quite different from the Russian. In some cases, as in Mol-
davia, Bessarabia, the Western Provinces (formerly part of the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania), local law was based on ancient statutes - e.g.,
the Lithuanian statute and the Magdeburg law in the towns of the
Western Ukraine. In other instances, local legal norms were based on
customs and oral tradition, for example in the Caucasus and in
Siberia. The Second Section established special commissions to deal
with the problem. But except for the Baltic Code, none of the com-
pilations of local law received legislative sanction. Nonetheless, they did
play some role in the political and legal history of the provinces. The
character of these codifications of local law and their implications for
Speransky's approach to the multinational aspect of the Empire appear
better when viewed against the pattern of codification of Russian law.
Therefore, let us turn first to an examination of the accomplishments
of the Second Section in respect to Russian law.
The compilation of a Complete Collection of the laws issued between
1649 and 1825 presented some serious difficulties and, contrary to the
impression created, the collection published in 1830 was far from com-
plete. To begin with, what was to be considered law? It was by no
means an easy thing to decide, for throughout the 18th century, there
had been many methods for issuing laws, and many different bodies
and institutions had had a hand in the legislation at one time or
another. To include only the legislative acts that dealt with broad
issues and set general precepts of law would exdude a host of casuistic
decrees and prescriptions that dealt with individual petitions and
specific cases. Legislation issued to take care of a specific case, however,
often acquired a much wider significance and sometimes set a precedent
for a whole series of decisions. Equally unsatisfactory was a selection
according to the source of the legislation, the government body or organ
that had enacted the law. The Emperor and his private chancery had
1 Maikov, "Speranskii i studenty zakonovedeniia," loc. cit., passim and la. Barshev,
Istoricheskaia zapiska 0 sodeistvii vtorogo otdeleniia sobstvennoi E. I. V. kantseliarii
razvitiiu iuridicheskikh nauk v Rossii (St. Pbg. 1876).