3 - Arguing from Archives
from Part I - Law as Documents
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 March 2026
Summary
Attempts to register and control the populations of the east left a documentary record that was often extremely local. Provincial subjects proved astute readers and compilers of local documentation, which they rearranged in order to make claims of right. These claims can be mined for their underlying legal ideologies. Provincial subjects imagined law not as an abstract system, but as a running list of privileges and disabilities. Rights emerged from having the most correct or most persuasive hermeneutic for making sense of collections of documents in dialogue with officials, through the process of generating legal paperwork. Archives were not merely repositories of external facts about the world: they were collections of arguments that could be made. Law emerged from the collaborative process of claiming such rights.
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- The Judgment of the ProvincesThe Roman Empire and the Origins of Law and Society, pp. 72 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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