Assembling a collection of studies to be published in English on the subject of Roman law is in the best of circumstances a bracing task, but when the number of contributions reaches 50, the undertaking must rank as something truly formidable. One might well doubt whether so many scholars writing regularly in this language on such a wide variety of legal topics as encompassed by this volume are to be found anywhere on this earth. The editors have taken a double gamble, first by enlisting a sizeable contingent of continental experts whose field has traditionally privileged ‘law’ over ‘society’, and second by recruiting a broad array of ancient historians whose area of expertise tends to run in the opposite direction. The result is in overall terms an impressive achievement that will long stand as a point of reference for specialists and non-specialists alike.
The 50 essays are divided into seven ‘Parts’: (1) ‘Introduction’, which contains two largely programmatic essays; (2) ‘Reading Roman Law’; (3) ‘The Constitutional Structure of the Roman State’; (4) ‘Legal Professionals and Legal Culture’; (5) ‘Settling Disputes’, subdivided into ‘Civil Actions and Civil Procedure’ and ‘Criminal Law and Social Order’; (6) ‘Persons before the Law’, subdivided into ‘Status’ and ‘Gender’; (7) ‘Legal Relations’, which contains sections on ‘Persons and Family’, ‘Property’, ‘Obligations’ and ‘Economics’. Two indexes, one for subjects and another for sources, round off the volume. One feature meriting particular praise is the decision to place bibliographies at the end of each chapter instead of accumulating all references in a cumbersome pile at the end of the book. There is a commendable effort to address a broad range of subjects, even though complete coverage of a field as vast as Roman law remains elusive.
In their introduction, the editors renounce doctrine and profess to concentrate on three aspects in particular: ‘Roman theories of law; historical inquiries into the autonomy of law; and the practice of law and society scholarship in the study of ancient societies’ (p. 4). There is a strongly aspirational aspect to the discussion that follows this declaration, and its relevance to the enterprise in overall terms seems open to question. No attempt is made to map these categories onto any of the seven parts of the volume. Nor is there any useful summary of what the book contains. Suffice it to say that this collection tends to privilege matters of procedure and what might be described as related subjects. It seems almost as inevitable as it might be ungrateful to complain of absences in a tome that runs to some 700 pages, but worth noting is that there is no discussion of the transmission of Classical law in later periods, so that we lack treatment of Justinian and the compilers, the history of law and legal texts and interpolation (the word does not even appear in the index). There is, thankfully, a great deal of doctrinal discussion to be found throughout, a feature that informs the best of the essays on offer.
All the same, one finds much of interest in these introductory comments, whatever their relation to the book's contents. Victory is declared in the battle over Roman law as a historical subject, with the benighted Pandectists relegated to the dustbin of historiography (p. 5), as we hear of the ‘interested efforts on the part of German Romanists to craft a picture of ancient practice in justificatory mimesis of themselves’. One could perhaps grant a bit more to the multigenerational struggle over the BGB than this assertion might seem to imply, but more interesting is that its premise is hotly disputed by J. Pölönen in the second introductory chapter, ‘Framing “Law and Society” in the Roman World’. This draws a fairly bright line between the approaches taken to this subject by Romanists and by ancient historians, not much to the credit of the former.
One might have wished for more give-and-take along these lines. Whatever view we adopt of the contemporary state of play regarding the study of ‘Roman Law and Society’, this debate is not going away soon. That is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Leaving aside Pölönen's account of the struggle of good guys and bad guys, how many of us really want a world devoid of doctrinal approaches to Roman law? To put the question another way, to what extent is it possible to write meaningfully about the subject without a reliance on close and careful study of the legal rules themselves?
The bulk of this volume suggests that the answer to these questions is a firm ‘not many’ and ‘not much’. This perspective is one the editors themselves might be thought to share, if one turns from the more theoretical aspects of their introduction to the more practical ones that emerge towards its close. Here they aver to ‘celebrate’ the diversity represented by the ‘great range of national and disciplinary traditions’ evinced by the authors; ‘We have emphatically not imposed any uniformity of approach in respect of theory’ (p. 6). This entails rather more than making a virtue out of a necessity. What it means in concrete terms is that the editors have unleashed over a score of Romanists operating at the top of their game in decisive if implicit refutation of Pölönen's pessimism. The result is a notably successful evocation of how far in recent years the discipline has come in moving away from a more exclusive focus on juristic argument and in increasingly taking on consideration of law's social context, without playing its traditions false.
A number of the topics addressed by the legal historians are of course by their nature ill-suited for extensive discussion of ‘jurisprudence’. More or less obvious examples include D. Mantovani on organising information about law and rendering it accessible, T. Beggio on epigraphy, and J.L. Alonso on papyrology. As such they align well with the best efforts of the ancient historians, such as the fine essay by F. Pina Polo on institutions and political participation in the Republic. This is followed by a series of articles by scholars whose range of expertise would seem to render the traditional classification by field beside the point. W. Eck shows how strongly the Principate was founded on law, J. Richardson examines provincial administration over the course of seven centuries, while S. Roselaar takes the analysis to the local level. In a similar way, one would not expect doctrine to play a primary role in the context of a series of essays dedicated to such subjects as legal writing, philosophy and rhetoric, not to speak of an entire Part (5) largely devoted to procedure and/or criminal law.
Several contributors, whatever their own disciplinary background, successfully demonstrate that there is no inevitable contrast between lucid exposition of the legal rules and their social context. One finds an exemplary article by R. Gamauf on slavery, two discerning essays on gender matters, one by V. Halbwachs and the other by M. Perry, an engaging treatment of ‘Price Setting and other Attempts to Control the Economy’ by E. Koops and an important contribution by D. Kehoe on land tenure and related issues. The list could easily be prolonged and that by quite a bit. On the other hand, it would be ungrateful to ignore the sublimely competent summary of the state of the (doctrinal) question offered by L. Capogrossi Colognesi for property, F. Cursi for delicts and R. Fiori for contracts, something especially worthy of note when appearing in the English language.
Not that any of this can be assumed to be easy. M. Peachin, towards the conclusion of a superb essay, remarks, ‘[w]hen the editors of this volume asked me to discuss lawyers in administration, I blithely envisioned a concise summary of what is already well known. However, as the writing began to take shape, the absence of anything at all like a full treatment of lawyers in the Roman administrative system became quickly apparent’ (pp. 171–2). This will ring a bell with many a contributor to sundry Handbooks, Companions and Encyclopedias. Another all too familiar challenge lies in locating an approach that promises to do justice to categories of thought both ancient and modern. Or, as A. Riggsby trenchantly puts it at the outset of his article on criminal law, ‘[i]t is not clear what this chapter is about’ (p. 310).
It follows that not all the sailing is perfectly smooth. In an essay dedicated to ‘Roman Law and Latin Literature’ M. Lowrie attempts to construct a sort of Möbius strip for the two, effectively (to double-down on metaphor) placing them on the same side of the same coin, in evident defiance of the editors’ assertion of legal autonomy in their introduction. Certain assertions regarding legal history (pp. 72–3) and substantive law (p. 75) might benefit from elucidation, at minimum. V. Vuolanto, writing about children and parents, runs into challenges with legal terminology (‘legislation’ is not always a synonym for ‘law’) and concepts (the notion of fictive sale might have been of some help). It is hard to know what to make of R. Knapp's assignment of (all) women to the category of marginalised groups, even as one might wish to qualify his statement that ‘[women] suffer a lengthy series of disabilities because except in a few special cases they are not sui iuris; that is, they are in the legal power of some male and cannot operate independently at law, as a male can’ (p. 366). A bit of doctrine can go a long way.
Despite a few such bumps in the road, the editors must be congratulated in summoning forth solid evidence, and no small amount of it, that the traditional divide between law and society in modern scholarship is far from inevitable. The contemporary study of Roman law emerges from this collection as something vital, vibrant and even exciting. Whatever the differences in approach taken – an aspect that in my opinion they have done well to foster and are right to celebrate – this subject remains a work in progress in the most optimistic sense of the term.
