Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World

Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Meyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139449117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Greeks wrote mostly on papyrus, but the Romans wrote solemn religious, public and legal documents on wooden tablets often coated with wax. This book investigates the historical significance of this resonant form of writing; its power to order the human realm and cosmos and to make documents efficacious; its role in court; the uneven spread - an aspect of Romanization - of this Roman form outside Italy, as provincials made different guesses as to what would please their Roman overlords; and its influence on the evolution of Roman law. An historical epoch of Roman legal transactions without writing is revealed as a juristic myth of origins. Roman legal documents on tablets are the ancestors of today's dispositive legal documents - the document as the act itself. In a world where knowledge of the Roman law was scarce - and enforcers scarcer - the Roman law drew its authority from a wider world of belief.

Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World

Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Meyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139449117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
Greeks wrote mostly on papyrus, but the Romans wrote solemn religious, public and legal documents on wooden tablets often coated with wax. This book investigates the historical significance of this resonant form of writing; its power to order the human realm and cosmos and to make documents efficacious; its role in court; the uneven spread - an aspect of Romanization - of this Roman form outside Italy, as provincials made different guesses as to what would please their Roman overlords; and its influence on the evolution of Roman law. An historical epoch of Roman legal transactions without writing is revealed as a juristic myth of origins. Roman legal documents on tablets are the ancestors of today's dispositive legal documents - the document as the act itself. In a world where knowledge of the Roman law was scarce - and enforcers scarcer - the Roman law drew its authority from a wider world of belief.

The Emperor of Law

The Emperor of Law PDF Author: Kaius Tuori
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191092258
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In the days of the Roman Empire, the emperor was considered not only the ruler of the state, but also its supreme legal authority, fulfilling the multiple roles of supreme court, legislator, and administrator. The Emperor of Law explores how the emperor came to assume the mantle of a judge, beginning with Augustus, the first emperor, and spanning the years leading up to Caracalla and the Severan dynasty. While earlier studies have attempted to explain this change either through legislation or behaviour, this volume undertakes a novel analysis of the gradual expansion and elaboration of the emperor's adjudication and jurisdiction: by analysing the process through historical narratives, it argues that the emergence of imperial adjudication was a discourse that involved not only the emperors, but also petitioners who sought their rulings, lawyers who aided them, the senatorial elite, and the Roman historians and commentators who described it. Stories of emperors settling lawsuits and demonstrating their power through law, including those depicting 'mad' emperors engaging in violent repressions, played an important part in creating a shared conviction that the emperor was indeed the supreme judge alongside the empirical shift in the legal and political dynamic. Imperial adjudication reflected equally the growth of imperial power during the Principate and the centrality of the emperor in public life, and constitutional legitimation was thus created through the examples of previous actions - examples that historical authors did much to shape. Aimed at readers of classics, Roman law, and ancient history, The Emperor of Law offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the much debated problem of the advent of imperial supremacy in law that illuminates the importance of narrative studies to the field of legal history.

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition PDF Author: Clifford Ando
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204883
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates in Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield. Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools—most prominently analogy and fiction—used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought. In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law PDF Author: David Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521895642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
This book reflects the wide range of current scholarship on Roman law, covering private, criminal and public law.

Writing and Power in the Roman World

Writing and Power in the Roman World PDF Author: Hella Eckardt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108418058
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This book focuses on the material practice of ancient literacy through a contextual examination of Roman writing equipment.

A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire

A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire PDF Author: David Gwynn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047432312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The appearance in 1964 of A.H.M. Jones’ The Later Roman Empire 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey transformed the study of the Late Antique world. In this volume a number of leading scholars reassess the impact of Jones’ great work, the influences that shaped his scholarship, and the legacy he left for later generations. Jones’ historical method, his fundamental knowledge of Late Roman political, social, economic and religious structures, and his famous assessment of the Decline and Fall of Rome are re-examined here in the light of modern research. This volume offers a valuable aid to academics and students alike who seek to better understand and exploit the priceless resource that is the Later Roman Empire. Contributors are Averil Cameron, Peter Garnsey, David Gwynn, Peter Heather, Caroline Humfress, Luke Lavan, Wolfgang Liebeschuetz, Stefan Rebenich, Alexander Sarantis, Roger Tomlin, Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Michael Whitby.

Roman Law in Context

Roman Law in Context PDF Author: David Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139425803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Roman Law in Context explains how Roman law worked for those who lived by it, by viewing it in the light of the society and economy in which it operated. The book discusses three main areas of Roman law and life: the family and inheritance; property and the use of land; commercial transactions and the management of businesses. It also deals with the question of litigation and how readily the Roman citizen could assert his or her legal rights in practice. In addition it provides an introduction to using the main sources of Roman law. The book ends with an epilogue discussing the role of Roman law in medieval and modern Europe, a bibliographical essay, and a glossary of legal terms. The book involves the minimum of legal technicality and is intended to be accessible to students and teachers of Roman history as well as interested general readers.

Trading Communities in the Roman World

Trading Communities in the Roman World PDF Author: Taco T. Terpstra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004238603
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In Trading Communities, Taco Terpstra shows that long-distance trade in the Roman Empire was conducted through foreign trading communities living overseas, held together by ethnic and geographical identity.

Law and Power in the Making of the Roman Commonwealth

Law and Power in the Making of the Roman Commonwealth PDF Author: Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316061922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
With a broad chronological sweep, this book provides an historical account of Roman law and legal institutions which explains how they were created and modified in relation to political developments and changes in power relations. It underlines the constant tension between two central aspects of Roman politics: the aristocratic nature of the system of government, and the drive for increased popular participation in decision-making and the exercise of power. The traditional balance of power underwent a radical transformation under Augustus, with new processes of integration and social mobility brought into play. Professor Capogrossi Colognesi brings into sharp relief the deeply political nature of the role of Roman juridical science as an expression of aristocratic politics and discusses the imperial jurists' fundamental contribution to the production of an outline theory of sovereignty and legality which would constitute, together with Justinian's gathering of Roman legal knowledge, the most substantial legacy of Rome.

Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic

Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic PDF Author: Valentina Arena
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107028175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Radical reappraisal of the political struggles of the late Roman Republic through a study of the conflicting uses of libertas.