Abstract
The present study focuses on the question of the specialization of the councils of the Court of Appeal at the end of the 17th century, i.e. whether individual cases were assigned to judges according to their professional or other specialization. First of all, the paper defines the very notion of specialization as a phenomenon that can be perceived in terms of geography, language, subject matter and personnel.
The initial sources are the minutes of the Court of Appeal, which survive for the end of the seventeenth century and from which it is possible to see which councils were assigned which cases to handle. On the basis of these protocols, the author conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected sources and concludes that all four types of specialization were applied to a greater or lesser extent in the Court of Appeal, but that they were never fully implemented.
Although this is an examination of a phenomenon that has not yet received the attention of the professional community, the results so far appear to be fruitful and may shed light on the internal workings of some courts, as it is a generally actionable phenomenon.