Roman Law as Part of Ancient Civilization: Reflections on Leopold Wenger's Last Work

Traditio ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 381-394
Author(s):  
Hans Julius Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Mediterranean Area ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Ancient Civilization ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

The monumental volume with which we are dealing is the legacy left to his science by a man who will always be counted among the most distinguished and most influential scholars of Roman law and ancient legal history in the first half of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he first began to teach Roman law at the University of Graz, Leopold Wenger had conceived a plan of writing a history of the whole legal order of the Romans that would comprise the total of public, procedural, and private institutions in one great unit. He proposed to see his unit in the light of its general political and cultural setting and to interpret it as bringing to its climax and final achievement, under Justinian, the evolution of law and legal thought of all antiquity; antiquity itself he understood as one single historical process interrelating the multitude of peoples and civilizations of the Mediterranean area that grew and declined, succeeded and influenced each other, until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire and were thus enabled to transmit their common heritage to later centuries. Understandably enough, this gigantic project involved more than one scholar could accomplish in one lifetime. Wenger was not able to carry it out. He did, however, succeed in completing, in this detailed description and discussion of the sources, the first instalment, and happily lived to see its publication shortly before his death on September 21, 1953, at the age of seventy-nine.

scholarly journals Stanisław Kryński – przyczynek do biografii

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Michał Lewandowski ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
World War ◽  
Catholic University ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World

As a young man Stanisław Kryński, our Polish scholar, intended to devote his life to Roman Law. The fact may be surprising as Kryński received a great deal of attention thanks to his Polish translations of English poetry and the first volume of The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. The first archival research shows that in his youth Kryński was really into Roman Law and was even going to do his doctorate on “Iudicum familiae erciscundae in a Classic Roman Law”. He became the assistant of the professor Ignacy Koschembahr-Łyskowski while studying at the Faculty of Law and State Science at the University of Warsaw. The professor became his academic mentor and enabled him to serve an academic apprenticeship in Rome in 1938. The outbreak of the Second World War pulled the rug from under Kryński’s feet. But still, the skills and knowledge acquired in Warsaw were extremely valuable when he lectured Roman Law at the Polish Faculty of Law in Oxford in the years 1944–1946. After returning to Poland, he became a higher education lecturer at SGH Warsaw School of Economics and at Catholic University of Lublin. He did not carry on the research into Roman Law.

Geen leven na Oxford? Rechtshistorici uit de Lage Landen (16)

Pro Memorie ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
C.H. van Rhee ◽  
Louis Sicking
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Content Type ◽  
East Indies ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
History Of ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The University ◽  
Theology And Philosophy

Abstract Apart from details about youth and family, the focus of this interview with Boudewijn Sirks is on his academic career. After studying law, theology and philosophy, he graduated with a DPhil on an aspect of Roman administrative law. He then specialised in Roman law in all its aspects and in almost all of its periods of application. An extension of this led him to research further in the legal history of the Dutch East Indies. Having worked at the Universities of Utrecht, Amsterdam and Leiden, he became Professor at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt for private law and legal history, then Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford, where he is still Fellow of All Souls College. The interview deals with the differences between legal educations in the Netherlands, Germany and England and with his views concerning the methodology of legal history.

Institutions of Ancient Roman Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi
Keyword(s):  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Family Wealth ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Unique Source ◽  
First Time

This chapter gives a rapid overview of the history of Roman public and private institutions, from their early beginning in the semi-legendary age of the kings to the later developments of the Imperial age. A turning point has been the passage from the kingdom to the republic and the new foundation of citizenship on family wealth, instead of the exclusiveness of clan and lineages. But still more important has been the approval of the written legislation of the XII Tables giving to all citizens a sufficient knowledge of the Roman legal body of consuetudinary laws. From that moment, Roman citizenship was identified with personal freedom and the rule of law. Following political and military success, between the end of IV and the first half of III century bce Rome was capable of imposing herself as the central power in Italy and the western Mediterranean. From that moment Roman hegemony was exercised on a growing number of cities and local populations, organized in the form of Roman of Latin colonies or as Roman municipia. Only in the last century bce were these different statutes unified with the grant of Roman citizenship to all Italians. In this same period the Roman civil law, which was applied to private litigants by the Roman praetors, had become a very complex and sophisticated system of rules. With the empire the system did not change abruptly, although the Princeps did concentrate in his hands the last power of the judiciary and became the unique source of new legislation. In that way, for the first time, the Roman legal system was founded on rational and coherent schemes, becoming a model, which Antiquity transmitted to the late medieval Europe.

scholarly journals THE ROLE OF PRIVATE LAW IN PROMOTING SOCIAL JUSTICE

Obiter ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eltjo Schrage
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
International Study ◽  
Study Group ◽  
Private Law ◽  
International Study Group ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
Metropolitan University ◽  
The University

The first contribution published in this edition is an abridged version of the inaugural lecture delivered by Professor Eltjo JH Schrage on 24 August 2009 in Port Elizabeth. The Faculty of Law is honoured that such an internationally esteemed jurist accepted the appointment as first Honorary Professor of the Faculty of Law in 2009. Prof Eltjo JH Schrage was born in Groningen. He studied law at the University of Groningen, where he obtained his doctorandus, a degree which is analogous to our master’s degree. In 1975 he defended his doctoral thesis entitled Libertas est facultas naturalis. Menselijke vrijheid in een tekst van de Romeinse jurist Florentinus (Human liberty in a text of the Roman jurist Florentinus). His academic career commenced in 1969 at the Free University, Amsterdam. In 1980 he was appointed as professor at the Free University in Roman Law and Legal History. In 1998 he became the director of the Paul Scholten Institute at the University of Amsterdam. Some of his other academic appointments include the following:• Chairperson: International Study Group on the Comparative Legal History of the Law of Restitution;• Chairperson: International Study Group on the Comparative Legal History of the Law of Torts;• Visiting Professor: University of Cape Town;• Visiting Fellow: Magdalen College, Oxford University as well as visiting professor at Oxford;• Visiting Professor: University of the North (now Limpopo) in Polokwane; and• Visiting Fellow: Trinity College, Cambridge University as well as visiting professor, Cambridge. Prof Schrage has published extensively in International journals in Dutch, English, German French, and Italian. He has edited, written and contributed to more than 30 books, and written more than 100 articles. He has been the supervisor of numerous doctoral students, including Prof Marita Carnelley of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and erstwhile member of the Faculty of Law, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and Prof André Mukheibir, Head of Department, Private Law of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. He was also the promoter of the honorary doctorate awarded by the University of Amsterdam to the former chief justice of South Africa, Arthur Chaskalson in 2002. Prof Schrage has also acted as judge in the Amsterdam court since 1981. Prof Schrage is married to Anneke Buitenbos-Schrage and the couple have four children and one grandchild.

The Jurisprudence of Humanism

Traditio ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 493-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron P. Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Major Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.

Late Antique Christian Law in the Eastern Roman Empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Monnickendam
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Biblical Commentary ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Legal Sociology

To date, early Christian sources have drawn the scholarly attention of theologians, scholars of biblical commentary, and historians, but not of legal historians, presumably because such sources do not offer sufficiently substantial material for legal historical research. Nevertheless, a few studies have blended legal history and late antique Christianity, and an analysis of these studies shows they are based on a “centralist,” or “formalist–positivist,” conceptualization of law. In this paper I review the scholarship of legal traditions in the eastern Roman Empire— namely, Roman law and Greek legal traditions, the halakha in rabbinic literature, and the halakhic traditions in Qumranic literature and in the New Testament—and contextualize it within developments in legal theory and legal sociology and anthropology (that is, the rise of legal pluralism). This review shows that developments in legal theory, in legal sociology and anthropology, and in legal history of the late antique world are producing new paradigms and models in the study of late antique legal history. These new models, together with new methods in reading early Christian non-legal texts of the eastern Roman Empire, can be utilized in the study of early Christianity, thereby opening gateways to the study of its legal traditions and revealing independent legal traditions that have remained hidden to date.

Papyri and Roman Imperial History, 1960–75

1976 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan K. Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
New Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Province ◽  
Selection Of

‘For those outside the circle of learned devotees important work by papyrologists too often remains unfamiliar’ (J. J. Wilkes, JRS 65 (1975), 187). In the past few years the contribution of the papyri to the history of the Roman Empire has been very important, and it is the main purpose of the notes which follow to provide for the historian a convenient summary of recent documentary evidence which demands his attention. This survey encompasses work which has appeared in the last fifteen years (though with reference to documents published earlier which have recently received significant discussion) and covers the period of Roman imperial history from Augustus to Constantine. The material is divided into three sections. In the first I collect items which provide new information on topics of general imperial history, mainly matters of chronology and prosopography relating to Emperors and the imperial house; to which I have added evidence for Emperors in direct contact with Egypt, relating largely to imperial visits and revolts. In the second part I discuss Egypt as a Roman province, its organization, officials, social and economic history; some of the fresh conclusions which have emerged naturally have a broader application, which I hope to have indicated in the course of my discussion. In the brief final section documents are collected which either have their provenance outside Egypt or specifically relate to places other than Egypt. It is hardly necessary to add that the overall selection of items is subjective and cannot hope to be comprehensive. It will be noticed that some important topics are intentionally excluded from systematic examination—in particular, Roman Law, Graeco-Roman religion and Christianity.

English Criminal Justice Administration, 1650–1850: A Historiographic Essay

2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-634 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce P. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Legal History ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Law ◽  
The University

In his inaugural lecture as Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge, delivered in October 1888, Frederic Maitland offered a set of provocative and now familiar reflections on “Why the history of English law is not written.” According to Maitland, although English archives possessed “a series of records which for continuity, catholicity, minute detail[,] and authoritative value” had “no equal…in the world,” the “unmanageable bulk” of these sources had “overburdened” aspiring historians of English law. As a result, “large provinces” of English legal history remained to be “reclaimed from the waste.” With few willing to undertake such reclamation efforts, the historiography of English law remained as bleak and barren as the bogs from which Maitland's Cambridgeshire had itself only reluctantly emerged.

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