“Istitutiones Iuris” of Albanian Consuetudinary Law

Abstract

The custom is among the sources of law, definitely, the most distant in time. Our legal tradition has been transmitted orally from generation to generation through the centuries and it bares these language elements that are considered fundamental for our people’s identity. Our society was shaped over the centuries under secular foreign occupation, and in full lack of a state authority to be represented with. Despite this, the juridical oral tradition and this kind of peculiar language managed to cross the millennia through its customs, creating and cultivating social and juridical institutions which have served to shape a collective conscience that made it possible for the modern state to be founded. Our analysis will concentrate principally in the representative values of the social belongings, creating the legal basis of the Albanian ethos and ethnos, which are always served as an autochthonous legal source. This might dispatch social justice values and human dignity. This analysis deepens its focus mainly in the strongholds of the common law; highlighting those social and legal institutions, that on our point of view have had the greatest influence in the creation of our national consciousness.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p337