Codifcation of Spanish Criminal Law in the Nineteenth Century 96 JCL 4:1 Codifcation of Spanish Criminal Law in the Nineteenth Century A Comparative Legal History Approach ANiCeto MASferrer* throughout the nineteenth century european legal science experienced a profound transformation whose consequences are in evidence to this day. it would be erroneous to think, however, that law reform in europe originated and developed solely in the nineteenth century. the roots of this transformative process can be seen in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and especially in the eighteenth centuries, the century of the enlightenment. Nor should one forget that the transformation of legal science was merely a particular instance of a new way of understanding science and the duty of the scientist in general. it would not be going too far to say that nineteenth-century law reform can only be understood from within the new coordinates of the concept of science, itself an expression of a newly-found understanding of mankind and society. We do not ofer here a panorama of the diverse factors that favored this transformation, nor discuss, as would be necessary, the characteristic traits of nineteenth-century legal science. 1 rather, we set out briefy the two contraposed concepts of law that emerged in the nineteenth century: the triumph of the codifcation of a rational law, which subsequently resulted in the defnitive abandonment of the old compilations – a technique and tool used until that time for compiling legislation in force that might have been promulgated centuries earlier. * Professor of Legal History, University of Valencia, Spain; Visiting Scholar at Melborne Law School, Australia (2008) and Harvard Law School, USA (2006-07); Herbert Smith Visiting Professor at Cambridge University, england (february-July 2005); research fellow, Max-Planck institute for european Legal History, frankfurt/ Main, Germany (May-August 2000-02); Associate Professor of Legal History, University of Girona, Spain (2000- 03); PhD in Law (2000), University of Girona, Spain; Licenciature Degree in Law (1995), University of Barcelona, Spain. i give many thanks to Andrew o’flynn, a Graduate Law student at Valencia University, for his idiomatic revision, and to my colleague Heikki Pihlajamaki, for his interesting comments. i also thank the Journal of Comparative Law for publishing this Article. An earlier version of this paper was partly presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History (tempe, Arizona, USA, 25-27 october 2007). 1 on this subject, see Javier Alvardo Planas, “Juristas del siglo XiX. De Savigny a Kelsen, “introducción”, in r. Domingo (ed.), Juristas Universales (2004), iii, pp. 23-57.