Conceptual issues of the system of sources of the Baltic private law of the XIX century

The author substantiates the view that the introduction of the codification of the Baltic private law of 1864, in effect, led to changes in the legal status of previously existing sources of law, and also changed the attitude of the doctrine to the law and the ways in which the norms of law were applied. The systematization of private law rules raised the issue of the priority of sources. This issue is illustrated by the example of such a source as Roman law. The priority of this source in the compila- tions of the late XVIII - first half of the XIX century does not look like an accidental phenomenon. As a consequence of the predominance of the historical school of law in the legal doctrine of Europe for the systematizers and codifiers, there was no need to prove the inconsistency of the theory of the dominant position of Roman law in the private law system. It recognizes the great merit of Roman law in the development of the legal life of many European countries, primarily Germany, where the fragmentation, the underdevelopment of secular intellectual culture and a number of other reasons hampered the formation of a unified national private law system for a long time. The same picture of “legal fragmentation” was characteristic of the Ostsee governorates. The similarity of the conditions for the formation of the private law system of these territories together with Germany determines the dominant of Roman law among private law sources and the law of the Baltic. However, by the middle of the XIX century Roman law no longer corresponded to the needs of the social-economic development of society, but the government of the Russian Empire purposely fetishized the legal archaic, most of which no longer had any connection with reality. This should be interpreted as an attempt to give out what is desired for reality and, at least in the scientific and legal and legislative levels, resist the onset of a new era. The fetishization of Roman law by authority led to the fact that the drafters of the draft of the Code of Private Law in 1864 had a conception of Roman law divorced from the social and economic context from which it arose.