Ecclesiastical law and State law

Abstract

The recently published, revised, supplemented and expanded edition of the 1938 textbook Ecclesiastical Law by Sergei Victorovič Troicki in Serbian language is a befitting occasion to call to mind his study on the ecclesiastical law, to perceive the contemporary place of the ecclesiastical law among legal sciences and once again examine its relationship with the state law. That the contemporary ecclesiastical law, being partly public, private, international, internal, objective, subjective, etc., cannot with complete reliability be classified into a separate branch of the law seems closest to the truth. Therefore, the ecclesiastical law may be said to make a separate sub-subsystem within the subsystem of the autonomous law. The place of the ecclesiastical law and its relationship with the state law does not genuinely reflect the contemporary influence of the church on the state and society, which is much more powerful and more comprehensive than the influence of its ecclesiastical law. That the connection between the church and the state, and the ecclesiastical law and the state law, has almost never been broken is also shown by the fact that, starting from the Middle Ages, jurists have been awarded the degree (and title) of the doctor of the ecclesiastical and secular law (doctorus iuris utrisque).