 These 16th-century French law professors applied the philological methods of the Italian humanists to legal texts.It was their aim to arrive at a historically more accurate understanding of the texts of the Roman Corpus Iuris Civilis.In addition to numerous commentaries on the "Corpus", Douaren wrote a leading commentary on the Roman law of obligations, "Commentarius de pactis" (1544), which greatly influenced modern theories of obligations.