Gratian is the only lawyer authoritatively known to be in Paradise. Not that he is lonely there, surrounded as he is by theologians and philosophers, Albertus Magnus on one side and Peter Lombard on the other. How did Gratian earn this favored place? Given the scarcity of lawyers in heaven, one may justly query whether it really was his lawyerly qualifications that made Gratian deserve Paradise. After all, he was an expert on canon law, the law of the Church, which exists on the borders between law and theology. Dante, who reported on the inhabitants of the Afterworld, seems to acknowledge the ambiguity inherent in Gratian's vocation by praising his mastery of “both courts,” i.e., the exterior, public court of justice and the interior, sacramental court of the confessional (Paradiso x 103–105). Perhaps it was as a theologian, not as a lawyer, that Gratian was admitted, and perhaps this is why he smiled, as Dante tells us he did. Or perhaps Dante thought of Gratian primarily as a pre-eminent teacher, since he awarded him a place between two other teachers. Albertus was the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, who was Dante's guide in this particular circle of Paradise. Medieval intellectuals knew also Gratian and the Lombard as eminent teachers through the textbooks which they had written and which were used in the basic teaching of canon law and theology throughout the middle ages and beyond.