Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition
Author: Clifford Ando
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2011-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812204883

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 in Law, 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.

The History of Law in Europe

The History of Law in Europe
Author: Bart Wauters
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2017-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786430762

Comprehensive and accessible, this book offers a concise synthesis of the evolution of the law in Western Europe, from ancient Rome to the beginning of the twentieth century. It situates law in the wider framework of Europe’s political, economic, social and cultural developments.

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans
Author: Andrew M. Riggsby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2010-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 052168711X

Andrew Riggsby provides a survey of the main areas of Roman law, and their place in Roman life.

The Twelve Tables

The Twelve Tables
Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2019-12-05
Genre: Law
ISBN:

This book presents the legislation that formed the basis of Roman law - The Laws of the Twelve Tables. These laws, formally promulgated in 449 BC, consolidated earlier traditions and established enduring rights and duties of Roman citizens. The Tables were created in response to agitation by the plebeian class, who had previously been excluded from the higher benefits of the Republic. Despite previously being unwritten and exclusively interpreted by upper-class priests, the Tables became highly regarded and formed the basis of Roman law for a thousand years. This comprehensive sequence of definitions of private rights and procedures, although highly specific and diverse, provided a foundation for the enduring legal system of the Roman Empire.

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law
Author: David Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2015-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521895642

This book reflects the wide range of current scholarship on Roman law, covering private, criminal and public law.

Legal engagement

Legal engagement
Author: Collectif
Publisher: Publications de l’École française de Rome
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2021-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 2728314659

The Roman empire set law at the center of its very identity. A complex and robust ideology of law and justice is evident not only in the dynamics of imperial administration, but a host of cultural arenas. Citizenship named the privilege of falling under Roman jurisdiction, legal expertise was cultural capital. A faith in the emperor’s intimate concern for justice was a key component of the voluntary connection binding Romans and provincials to the state. Even as law was a central mechanism for control and the administration of state violence, it also exerted a magnetic effect on the peoples under its control. Adopting a range of approaches, the essays explore the impact of Roman law, both in the tribunal and in the culture. Unique to this anthology is attention to legal professionals and cultural intermediaries operating at the empire’s periphery. The studies here allow one to see how law operated among a range of populations and provincials—from Gauls and Brittons to Egyptians and Jews—exploring the ways local peoples creatively navigated, and constructed, their legal realities between Roman and local mores. They draw our attention to the space between laws and legal ideas, between ethnic, especially Jewish, life and law and the structures of Roman might; cases in which shared concepts result in diverse ends; the pageantry of the legal tribunal, the imperatives and corruptions of power differentials; and the importance of reading the gaps between depiction of law and its actual workings. This volume is unusual in bringing Jewish, and especially rabbinic, sources and perspectives together with Roman, Greek or Christian ones. This is the result of its being part of the research program “Judaism and Rome” (ERC Grant Agreement no. 614 424), dedicated to the study of the impact of the Roman empire upon ancient Judaism.

Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire

Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire
Author: Clifford Ando
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2000-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520220676

"As he illuminates the relationship between the imperial government and the empire's provinces, Ando deepens our understanding of one of the most striking phenomena in the history of government."--BOOK JACKET.

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society
Author: Paul J du Plessis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 753
Release: 2016-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191044423

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society surveys the landscape of contemporary research and charts principal directions of future inquiry. More than a history of doctrine or an account of jurisprudence, the Handbook brings to bear upon Roman legal study the full range of intellectual resources of contemporary legal history, from comparison to popular constitutionalism, from international private law to law and society, thereby setting itself apart from other volumes as a unique contribution to scholarship on its subject. The Handbook brings the study of Roman law into closer alignment and dialogue with historical, sociological, and anthropological research into law in other periods. It will therefore be of value not only to ancient historians and legal historians already focused on the ancient world, but to historians of all periods interested in law and its complex and multifaceted relationship to society.

The Justice of Constantine

The Justice of Constantine
Author: John Dillon
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2012-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472118293

An examination of Constantine the Great's legislation and government