Roman Law before the Twelve Tables

Bringing together a team of international experts from different subject areas – including law, history, archaeology and anthropology – this book re-evaluates the traditional narratives surrounding the origins of Roman law before the enactment of the Twelve Tables. Much is now known about the archaic period, relevant evidence from later periods continues to emerge and new methodologies bring the promise of interpretive inroads. This book explores whether, in light of recent developments in these fields, the earliest history of Roman law should be reconsidered. Drawing upon the critical axioms of contemporary sociological and anthropological theory, the contributors yield new insights and offer new perspectives on Rome’s early legal history. In doing so, they seek to revise our understanding of Roman legal history as well as to enrich our appreciation of its culture as a whole.

Author(s):  
Paul J. du Plessis

This chapter provides a historical sketch of Rome. It has been written to provide a contextual basis for the study of Roman private law. The history of Rome is traditionally divided into three main periods based on the dominant constitutional structure in Roman society during these three periods. These are the Monarchy (eighth century bc–510 bc), Republic (509–27 bc), and Empire (27 bc–ad 565). Scholars of Roman law tend to refine this division even further. Thus, to the scholar of Roman law, the period from the founding of Rome in the eighth century bc–c. 250 bc is regarded as the ‘archaic’ period of Roman law. The period thereafter, from c. 250 bc–27 bc, is generally described as the ‘pre-classical period’ of Roman law.For scholars of Roman law, the ‘classical’ period, c. first three centuries AD, and the Justinianic period, c. sixth century AD, are the most important, owing to the compilation of ‘classical’ Roman law by order the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian, in the sixth century.


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):  
James Q. Whitman

This contribution describes the life and work of an American law professor who writes about European legal history. It is a sad truth that American interest in European scholarship has been in steady decline for some decades. The author remains a believer in the fundamental importance of European legal history despite that; the contribution describes his quarter century of research in the United States, and his efforts, not always successful, to convince his colleagues that Europe matters. After beginning his career working on the German history of Roman law, the author was drawn into topics that spoke more directly to the dilemmas and oddities of American life. Many of those topics involved the comparative legal history of dignity; more recently they have included work on criminal procedure and the law of war.


Pro Memorie ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
C.H. van Rhee ◽  
Louis Sicking

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-243
Author(s):  
Neilesh Bose

Abstract Faiz Ahmed's Afghanistan Rising enters several historical subfields through a textured study of Afghanistan's modern history. This introduction to the kitabkhana offers a snapshot of these contributions—and their limits—through the lens of recent developments in imperial history, legal history, and global history.


2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-461
Author(s):  
George L Gretton
Keyword(s):  

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.


2018 ◽  
pp. 153-165
Author(s):  
L. V. Bertovsky ◽  
V. M. Klyueva ◽  
A. L. Lisovetsky

Sergey Esenin’s tragic end is widely known and provokes disputes to this day. The official reports put it down as a suicide. The incident could be analyzed more effectively by means of an interdisciplinary approach using the latest forensic know-how. The documented circumstances of Esenin’s death, found in recorded testimonies and interviews, as well as the materials of the Russian National Esenin Committee of Writers, are examined through the author’s own classification of forensically relevant evidence of suicide. The analysis reveals that suicide remains the most probable version. Far from solving this incident for good, these conclusions may become an important forensic contribution to the history of Russian culture.


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