This book will provide an outline history of the development of Roman legal thinking and law-making from the Twelve Tables (c. 450 BCE) to the Corpus Iuris Civilis of the emperor Justinian (early 530s CE). It will not be a ‘Textbook of Roman Law’, of which there are several already, which confine themselves exclusively to expounding the law (as they define it) in their own terms.
The topic cannot be separated from the wider historical contexts, within which the different manifestations of law took shape. In the period under review, Rome evolved from a primitive ‘Republic’ to an imperial state, extending from the Euphrates to Hadrian’s Wall, and its government changed from the collective rule of Senate and People to the dominance of emperors. Indeed, one of the main contentions of this book is that Roman law existed in many forms (statutes, edicts, jurisprudence, court decisions, custom, etc.) and that to talk about “Roman law” in the singular is to beg the question as to what Roman law was.
The framework of the book will therefore be chronological, with a series of chapters on especially significant figures (Scaevola, Gaius, Ulpian) interspersed. I shall also provide what can only be brief sketches of the salient features of significant aspects of Roman law, namely the law of obligations and succession; the law of persons will also be covered in the chapter on Gaius.
This structure will allow for the interweaving of several themes: a) the development of different forms of law in their constitutional context; b) the evolution of law as procedure; c) the development of the content of Roman law; d) the role of jurists as interpreters of the ius civile; e) the question of who ‘owned’ Roman law; f) a focus on key individuals, who illustrate the development of legal thinking from the Late Republic to the creation of the imperial law codes in the fifth and sixth centuries.
