This chapter argues that the French coutumiers are part of a Europe-wide vernacular legal revolution. Traditional narratives set these texts within the transition from custom to law, or as attempts to make custom more elegant in the face of a sense of inferiority to Roman law. The question of language of these early written customs has received little attention since outdated debates between Romanists and Germanists over whether custom originated in primordial Germanic tribes or was a disguised spin-off of university legal studies. However, language was key to the development of a written customary law. Vernacular writing in Europe began in earnest in the later twelfth century and proliferated afterwards. Coutumier authors chose to ride this wave of vernacular writing, rejecting the language of the universities and traditional written record in favour of the language of new histories, epics, and romance. The coutumiers were part of the new vernacular culture; it was a literature of lordship and dispute resolution in the lay courts for a lay public who lived in the vernacular.

The fourth chapter discusses the question of why now – why did customary law become the subject of vigorous written output at this particular thirteenth-century moment? The answer lies in the politics of customary law or, more specifically, the changes in both society and legal culture that created new zones of competition between secular and ecclesiastical courts. Competition between the temporal and spiritual jurisdictions was, of course, not new. The investiture controversy that began in the eleventh century, based in the conflict over the right of appointment of church officials, showed this to be a key issue of the high medieval period. The nature of competition manifested in the coutumiers was a little different. The coutumiers aimed to theorize, regularize, and professionalize the secular courts in the face of ecclesiastical courts, which had already gone through the same process and offered a competing forum at a time when boundaries were still being defined.

This chapter provides a snapshot view of the different ways that 195 countries around the world use lay participation in legal decision-making. We collected information from a variety of sources, including new expert surveys, legal research, and existing empirical evidence, to determine which countries use lay citizens as legal decision-makers in criminal cases and how they use them. Approximately two-thirds of the world’s countries use some form of lay participation, and the most commonly used forms are juries and mixed tribunals. The use and form of lay participation vary by geography and by the legal tradition of the country. The majority of countries in Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, and North America use some form of lay participation in their legal systems. Countries with common-law or customary-law legal traditions are most likely to rely on lay citizens as legal decision-makers. The widespread use of lay participants around the globe underscores the importance of studying this phenomenon. This chapter provides a baseline against which future studies in lay participation can be measured.