The contributors to this Companion are all very distinguished scholars writing squarely in their respective areas of special expertise (e.g. Johnston himself on ‘Succession’, Metzger on ‘Litigation’) and, it would seem, taking real pains over their assignments. They are overwhelmingly northern European and about two-thirds are on law faculties. While the editor did not impose any specific format, and the contributors of course have individual points of view, the shared goal was clearly to provide broad, factual surveys of the various topics. The authors interlace historical and thematic organization in differing ways and are remarkably successful in organizing and compressing the large amounts of information they are responsible for. I will have less to say about the individual articles than about the conception of the volume as a whole.

The work is divided into six sections: introduction/methodology (two chapters), sources of law for persons in antiquity (two), sources of information for scholars today (four), private law (six), public law (two), and the afterlife of Roman law (five). Except for the section specifically on reception, the chapters generally cover very wide chronological ranges, often from the time of the kings down to Justinian. (I am not sure why the chapter on ‘law in the provinces’ largely ends at the Lex Irnitana.)

Strikingly in a field that has historically been quite inward-looking, the editor has clearly made accessibility to non-specialists a real priority. Occasional technical terms slip in, and German (though not normally Latin) often goes untranslated, but on the whole the efforts seem to me to have been successful. Somewhat different from the other chapters is du Plessis on ‘Property’. This opens with a technical, argumentative and extremely interesting section on changes over time in the structure of accounts of this area of the law. I would suggest, however, that the non-expert read the later, summary part of the chapter first, then come back to this.

In the second, scene-setting essay, Winkel offers a deep historical sketch of approaches to Roman law, ranging from isolationist models to much more contexualizing ones. They differ mainly in (1) how far they are willing to stray from legal texts in search of evidence for what ‘the law’ was, and (2) the extent to which they extend their interest to ‘non-legal’ inputs to the law (for example, the influence of philosophical thought patterns) and to its external outputs (for example, the economic effects of changes in transaction costs). But this typology seems to me to miss an important distinction of more recent vintage. (I have in mind here a debate more or less explicit in Frier, JRA 24 (2011), 564–6; McGinn's epilogue to his edited volume, Obligations in Roman Law (2012), 334–8; and especially Bryen, CPh 109 (2014), 346–65.) The scholars in Winkel's typology share fairly abstract understandings of what law is, whether in doctrinal or intellectual historical form. They differ from scholars (mostly ancient historians, perhaps mostly American at the moment) who are more apt to see law as constituted in specific legal acts. That view destabilizes the distinction between law and context and in some cases the coherence of doctrine itself. This position is not recognized in the theoretical section of the Companion, and makes only occasional appearance in its body. There are exceptions, of course. Humfress ends her chapter on ‘Patristic Sources’ with some acute observations along the lines just raised. A deliberately anachronistic notion of ‘commercial law’ does very useful denaturalizing work in Aubert's chapter on ‘Commerce’. Meyer's entire chapter on ‘Writing in Roman Legal Contexts’ uses tablets not as a ‘source’ for something else, but to examine their own cultural value. On the whole, however, Roman law here is a free-standing structure, essentially the creation of jurists and legislators and largely operative independent of its various creators.

The present volume is not polemical on any of this, nor is the choice of perspective a source of error in individual chapters, but a couple of issues can be raised. First, ‘Roman law’ is given a rather timeless quality. The fact that contributors have had to lump together everything from regal to Justinianic, especially in the public law areas but also in several others, may obscure as much as it reveals. It also explains why such a large chunk of the work is dedicated to ‘Byzantium and beyond’. That is not inherently inappropriate, but the allocation of space is not a neutral move, and that leads to the second issue.

A Companion such as this is normally understood to make a field accessible to those not already deeply involved in it, often to students and scholars who will read little or nothing beyond the book itself. From that point of view, one can imagine other things that could have been included whether at the cost of trimming the later chapters here or simply of a longer book. The formal legal system created a vast array of resources for citizens, for officials of the state and for legal professionals. A certain kind of legal historian would have found more space to examine how individual agents put those resources to use. To take a few examples where we get hints in passing that ‘application’ of the law might not be a simple thing: how is the panoply of officially defined contract types actually used? How is Roman law actually deployed in the provinces (and does it really tie as neatly to citizenship as it ‘should’)? Given that even juristic law is internally contested, what moves within the discourse make that happen the way it does? More generally, despite a good account by Wolf of surviving documentary tablets, there is less use of them than there might have been. Other documentary evidence (papyri, inscriptions beyond the Lex Irnitana) fares even less well. The editor has made reasonable choices here, but it is worth noting that they are choices and that some readers might be better served by somewhat different ones.