Acknowledgements
This book is a slightly altered version of a Ph.D. dissertation in law, which has been accepted by the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) on 21 March 2018.* It is the result of four and a half years of research at the KU Leuven Research Unit Roman Law and Legal History. This project would never have been completed without the support of many, both within and outside of the academia.
Many thanks are due to my main supervisor, Em. Prof. Dr. Laurent Waelkens, and my co-supervisor, Prof. Dr. Wim Decock. At decisive moments in the research process, the members of my supervisory committee have been of great help too. I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Dr. Alain Wijffels (KU Leuven / UCL / ULeiden / CNRS), Prof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Wolfgang Ernst (University of Oxford / UZH) and Prof. Dr. Veerle Colaert (KU Leuven). My gratitude is extended as well to the other members of the examination committee, Prof. Dr. Anja Amend-Traut (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg) and Em. Prof. Dr. Marc Boes (KU Leuven) for the important role they played in the examination procedure.
Furthermore, Prof. Dr. Stephan Dusil should be thanked for his methodological comments to my research proposal. During research stays and conferences abroad, I received helpful comments, most notably from Prof. Dr. Andreas Thier, Dr. Mike Macnair, Prof. Dr. Joshua Getzler and Em. Prof. Dr. Boudewijn Sirks, Prof. Dr. John Cairns and Prof. Dr. Paul du Plessis, Prof. Dr. Albrecht Cordes, Prof. Dr. Bram Van Hofstraeten and Prof. Dr. Dave De ruysscher. The conversations on my topic with my colleagues at the KU Leuven department, and especially with Em. Prof. Dr. Fred Stevens, Em. Prof. Dr. Jos Monballyu, Prof. Dr. Randall Lesaffer, Dr. Paolo Astorri and Dr. Dante Fedele, have been very helpful too. Useful insights were also given by the respondents at my doctoral seminars, and by other participants of the conferences where I presented a paper in the course of this research project, as well as by the anonymous peer-reviewers of this book and previous publications. As a matter of course, all remaining failures and errors are exclusively mine.
This research has been made possible thanks to a lot of institutional and financial support. I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Bernard Tilleman, dean of the KU Leuven Faculty of Law, and to the Faculty Board for its financial support in the
Words fail to describe my profound gratitude to my friends and family. A special word of thanks to my siblings and parents, for their enormous efforts to relieve me from most practical tasks, for their ceaseless encouragements, unremitting confidence, and unconditional support.
Deo gratias.
This book also contains three annexes. The first two annexes offer an index of authors of the Hollandsche Consultatien and of the Utrechtsche Consultatien respectively. The third annex lists all other selected consilia and decisiones. These annexes are available online via: https://www.law.kuleuven.be/romrecht/LHL33Annexes/.