Institutions of Ancient Roman Law

Author(s):  
Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi

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.

1968 ◽  
Vol 114 (506) ◽  
pp. 11-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dermot Walsh

There seems little doubt from available statistics that the Republic of Ireland has the highest rate of hospitalized psychiatric morbidity in the world. There are no complete international figures available for this statistic but the World Health Organization published for the first time in 1961 returns for numbers of patients treated in hospital in 119 different countries (W.H.O. 1961). In many cases the returns were incomplete or unsatisfactory in one or more particulars. The ideal was to establish for each country the total number of patients treated during each one of the five years 1955–1959. The number treated was defined as “the patients present at the beginning of the year in the various public and private institutions specializing in psychiatry and in other institutions (general hospitals, etc.) plus admissions and readmissions during the year”. Unfortunately this ideal was achieved for only a minority of the 119 countries. The difficulties encountered in compiling the figures are set out in the publication itself.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mbuzeni Mathenjwa

The history of local government in South Africa dates back to a time during the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. With regard to the status of local government, the Union of South Africa Act placed local government under the jurisdiction of the provinces. The status of local government was not changed by the formation of the Republic of South Africa in 1961 because local government was placed under the further jurisdiction of the provinces. Local government was enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa arguably for the first time in 1993. Under the interim Constitution local government was rendered autonomous and empowered to regulate its affairs. Local government was further enshrined in the final Constitution of 1996, which commenced on 4 February 1997. The Constitution refers to local government together with the national and provincial governments as spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent and interrelated. This article discusses the autonomy of local government under the 1996 Constitution. This it does by analysing case law on the evolution of the status of local government. The discussion on the powers and functions of local government explains the scheme by which government powers are allocated, where the 1996 Constitution distributes powers to the different spheres of government. Finally, a conclusion is drawn on the legal status of local government within the new constitutional dispensation.


Author(s):  
Amir A. Khisamutdinov

The article is devoted to the history of librarianship in Shanghai in the Russian emigration community. For the first time there is described the activities of public and private libraries, and paid attention to the individuals who contributed to forming of these funds.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  

This article has been produced by the Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG). It provides in detail, and publicly for the first time, a genuinely informed explanation for the origins and function of CTAG. It covers the nature and challenge of threat assessment, the methodology applied as well various iterations of the threat assessments that are undertaken. This leads on to an explanation of how New Zealand’s National Terrorism Threat Level is set. Overall, this article provides an informative and well-rounded explanation of the components that comprise the National Terrorism Threat Level and makes for essential reading for wider public service, academic, and security conscious public and private institutions across the country.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 754-763 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia V. Gerasimova

The article is devoted to one of the Soviet State’s policy directions at the first stage of its existence, aimed at the preservation of cultural va­lues and the formation of museum art collections. The poorly studied question about the features of this policy implementation is revealed on the example of the TASSR (Kazan Province — before May 1920), where in the 1920s a whole network of museums was created; almost in each of them, an art department was organized. The appeal to this topic is relevant in connection with the opening of a large number of public and private museums, which face similar challenges, as well as the active scientific activities of museums to study their own collections, in the framework of creation of the State Catalogue of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation. For the first time, the article introduces into scientific circulation a number of sources, on the basis of which the main directions of this activity, as well as the museums’ art collections themselves, are analyzed. In the TASSR, the interaction with the State Museum Fund (SMF) was carried out by the Department for Museums and Protection of Monuments of Art, Anti­quities and Nature, employees of which (P.M. Dulsky and P.E. Kornilov) were engaged not only in organization of the artworks’ transferring to museums, but also in their selection. The article states that, thanks to the SMF, the Central Museum of the TASSR had the most complete and valuable art collection, and an interesting collection was formed in the Kozmodemyansky District Museum, which was part of the Kazan Province until 1920. This study shows that the SMF was an important and effective mechanism for the implementation of state policy in the field of culture: its activities contributed to the creation of provincial museums’ collections, based on scientific principles and aimed at presenting the history of fine arts development.


Author(s):  
Aaron J. Kachuck

This Introduction presents a study of Latin vocabulary for solitude as background for replacing bipartite divisions of Roman life (e.g., otium and negotium, “public” and “private”) with a tripartite model comprising public, private, and solitary spheres. It outlines this model’s applicability to Greek literature and philosophy, Roman religion, and Roman law, leading to a discussion of the Roman bedroom (cubiculum) and the solitary reading and writing to which it could be home. Reviewing the history of scholarship on Roman society, religion, and literature from antiquity through the present, it demonstrates how and why solitude has been written out of the study of Roman culture, and how the problem of solitude relates to the question of the individual in ancient society. Finally, it explores the relationship of literature to Rome’s solitary sphere in the age of Virgil, addressing problems of periodization, the relationship between literary criticism, philosophy, and literary production.


1987 ◽  
Vol 15 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 201-207
Author(s):  
Eugenio I. Cuomo

The computer revolution in Israel began almost ten years ago, when computers for public use appeared for the first time in banks, challenging a very hesitant and embarassed public. After banks, other public and private institutions, especially financial institutions like insurance companies, the Stock Exchange and others, started producing databases for internal and external purposes.


Traditio ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 381-394
Author(s):  
Hans Julius Wolff

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.


Author(s):  
Daniel Levy

Hugo Chavez's clash with Venezuelan higher education is a vivid present-day example of a history of confrontation between leftist, populist regimes and higher education in Latin America. Chavez has transformed the public sector through creation and expansion of new universities. Chavez's policies have alienated the country's private institutions of higher education. Both public and private universities are reduced in importance.


Author(s):  
Emanuele Conte

In this article I wish to show how history of legal doctrines can assist in a better understanding of the legal reasoning over a long historical period. First I will describe the nineteenth century discussion on the definition of law as a ‘science’, and some influences of the medieval idea of science on the modern definition. Then, I’ll try to delve deeper into a particular doctrinal problem of the Middle Ages: how to fit the feudal relationship between lord and vassal into the categories of Roman law. The scholastic interpretation of these categories is very original, to the point of framing a purely personal relationship among property rights. The effort made by medieval legal culture to frame the reality into the abstract concepts of law can be seen as the birth of legal dogmatics.


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