Where does reception collide?

Friedrich Carl von Savigny's 1815 Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages) founded the scholarly study of how the law of ancient Rome survived and was taken up by later European courts and universities, a process legal historians came to call the reception. Franz Wieacker's 1995 A History of Private Law in Europe gave the standard modern account, tracing how continental jurisdictions absorbed Roman legal categories into their own private law over centuries. Here reception is one legal order adopting the rules and concepts of another, tracked by which foreign doctrines a jurisdiction enacts and applies, and it has nothing to do with a reader building meaning from a text or a receiver pulling a signal out of noise.[1][2]

Unit

One doctrine, rule, or whole body of foreign law taken into a jurisdiction's own law

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced by legal historians through statutes, court practice, and university teaching that adopt the foreign law

Hans Robert Jauss's 1967 inaugural lecture at Konstanz, published in English in 1970 as Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory, argued that a work's meaning is not fixed in the text but produced anew by each generation of readers against their own horizon of expectations. Wolfgang Iser's 1972 The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach refined this by showing how readers fill the gaps a text leaves open, so meaning emerges in the act of reading. Here reception is the audience's active construction of meaning from a text, studied through readers and their responses, and it is unrelated to one legal system adopting another's law or a receiver recovering a signal from a channel.[3][4]

Unit

One audience's reading of a work, set against its horizon of expectations

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through readers' responses, review history, and the changing interpretation of a work over time