Liability Related to Animals in the Statute of the Lwów Armenian Community

Abstract

The pre-partition Kingdom of Poland was considered homeland by numerous minorities, including a group of Middle-Eastern immigrants – the Armenian diaspora. They brought with them their own laws, customs, faith and language, and after settling in a new place, in south-eastern Poland, they were able to interact with other residents and creatively transform and develop their legal system. The creation of the Lwów Armenian Statute was initiated by a dispute between the Lwów city authorities and members of the Armenian community in 1518. The content of the normative text of the Statute, however, predates its final redaction. In fact, it is a patchwork and complex normative act. The most important of its sources was the oldest Armenian lawcode: the Datastanagirk of Mkhitar Gosh. His work integrated various legal concepts, most essential of which constituted the Mosaic law of the Pentateuch. Both Mkhitar Gosh and his unknown successors did not simply copy and join together parts of earlier normative acts, they rather processed, re-read, and up-dated norms. The discussed Statute contains legal solutions which adopted in an original way the legal thought of different sources and created own, innovative normative concepts. Among those we can find a variety of legal norms covering liability related to animals.