Actually, the great innovation that is due to these Bolognese jurists was to develop a system of laws separating spiritual and economic points of view in order to reconcile the teachings of the Fathers of the Church against greed and its economic implications with the constant legitimization of new speculative practices. Thus was built the doctrine “of the two forums,” which Rothbard describes explain as follows:

The doctrine of the two forums enabled the canonists to resolve the seeming contradiction in canon law. The free-bargaining, laesio enormis, common market principle was the realm of external law and the open court, where, in other words, a roughly free market could prevail. On the other hand, the strictures against mercantile profits going beyond labour, costs, and risk were a matter not for the state and external law, but for conscience in the confessional.

To these Catholic canons of the University of Bologna the history of economic thought—as Rothbard was the first to point out—owes the legitimization in Europe of new forms of investment and the development of the modern capitalist system, freed from the spiritual and moral element, which belongs in the conscience of the individual and in his private relation with God. This new system of mostly-free entrepreneurial action would be the object of studies of the best-known scholars of Salamanca.