The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates inLaw, Language, and Empire in the ...Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield.
Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools-most prominently analogy and fiction-used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought.
In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.
As the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great has long interested those studying the establishment of Christianity. But Constantine is also notable for his ability to control a ...sprawling empire and effect major changes.The Justice of Constantineexamines Constantine's judicial and administrative legislation and his efforts to maintain control over the imperial bureaucracy, to guarantee the working of Roman justice, and to keep the will of his subjects throughout the Roman Empire.
John Dillon first analyzes the record of Constantine's legislation and its relationship to prior legislation. His initial chapters also serve as an introduction to Roman law and administration in later antiquity. Dillon then considers Constantine's public edicts and internal communications about access to law, trials and procedure, corruption, and punishment for administrative abuses. How imperial officials relied on correspondence with Constantine to resolve legal questions is also considered. A study of Constantine's expedited appellate system, to ensure provincial justice, concludes the book.
Constantine's constitutions reveal much about the Theodosian Code and the laws included in it. Constantine consistently seeks direct sources of reliable information in order to enforce his will. In official correspondence, meanwhile, Constantine strives to maintain control over his officials through punishment; trusted agents; and the cultivation of accountability, rivalry, and suspicion among them.
Roman law as a field of study is rapidly evolving to reflect new perspectives and approaches in research. Scholars who work on the subject are increasingly being asked to conduct research in an ...interdisciplinary manner whereby Roman law is not merely seen as a set of abstract concepts devoid of any background, but as a body of law which operated in a specific social, economic and cultural context. This "context-based" approach to the study of Roman law is an exciting new field which legal historians must address. Since the mid-1960s, a new academic movement has advocated a "law and society" approach to the study of Roman law instead of the prevailing dogmatic methodology employed in many Faculties of law.
The aim of this study was to analyse the importance of the order and characterization of the days (Fasti) for the legislation and jurisdiction in ancient Roman civil law (ius civile). After having ...summarized the order of the months and weeks in the Roman lunisolar calendar, both the categories dies fasti / dies nefasti (according to Varro: „dies fasti, per quos praetoribus omnia verba sine piaculo licet fari”) and those of dies comitiales and dies nefasti publici were to be defined. Finally (as the adjective fastus can be derived from the same root as fatum, i.e. the verb fari), it seemed to be worth throwing some light on the sacral roots of the legis actio sacramento.
The book presents a coherent theory of the law of donatio sub modo in its diachronic sequence and brings new results for the understanding of unjustified-enrichment-thinking, especially in the form ...of the condictio ob rem with a view to a general theory of dationes ob rem.
Das Buch zeigt römischrechtliche Entwicklungslinien zum Rechtsinstitut der „Schenkung unter Auflage“ auf, woraus sich darüber hinaus Folgerungen für das bereicherungsrechtliche Denken ergeben, insbesondere in Form der condictio ob rem mit Ausblick auf ein allgemeines Verständnis der dationes ob rem.
Bringing together specialists in ancient history, archaeology and Roman law, this book provides new perspectives on long-distance trade in the Roman world. Recent archaeological work has shown that ...maritime trade across the Mediterranean intensified greatly at the same time as the Roman state was extending its power overseas. This book explores aspects of this development and its relationship with changes in the legal and institutional apparatus that supported maritime commerce. It analyses the socio-legal framework within which maritime trade was conducted, and in doing so presents a new understanding of the role played by legal and social institutions in the economy of the Roman world.
