The turning of lawyers' law into written law found its consummation in the modern civil codes. Like the Corpus Juris, these are for the most part codifications of the lawyers' law, but statutory provisions proper are also to be found in them. Externally, the lawyers' law is here entirely assimilated to the written law; and this fact has already entered so deeply into the legal consciousness of the people and the modes of thinking of the lawyers, that even those will have to reckon with it who do not overlook the internal differences on account of the external assimilation.

5 Where foreign statutes are cited as authorities, as is done frequently for instance, by Swiss courts with regard to German statutes, the foreign law is treated not as a statute but as "written reason," just as the opinions of an author might be cited.

After all, lawyers' law remains lawyers' law even when it is put into sections and adopted by a representative assembly; the distinctive character of this source of law will continue to produce its effects below the surface. Yet it is apparent on all sides that this intrinsic difference finds no sort of outward recognition. Even the fictions and constructive assumptions of the civil law are in force as if they were in the nature of real statutes. It is assuredly very doubtful whether there ever have been, in Germany, servitudes in the Roman sense; yet the whole civil law relating to servitudes, taken as it was from Roman conditions, had as a matter of course to be applied to those legal relations which in the German civil law were treated as analogous to Roman servitudes, even to such an extent that one had to sue by a form of action like the Roman "actio confessoria."