(image source: Historiek.net)
Workshop of
the Committee for Legal History (KVAB) and the International Research Network
of the Flanders Research Foundation ‘Structural Determinants of Economic
Performance in the Roman World’.
Organised
by Koenraad Verboven (UGent) and Paul Erdkamp (VUBrussel)
programme
and further details: http://www.sdep.ugent.be/events/law-and-economic-performance-in-the-roman-world
Participation
is free, but registration is required by mail to Koen.Verboven@ugent.be
Formal or
designed institutions and organisations constitute the visible forms of
economic governance. They include laws and official regulations (i.e
institutions), and bodies (i.e. organisations) endowed with the authority to
formulate, interpret and enforce these at local (e.g. cities) and supra-local
(e.g. states and empires) levels, both in private contexts (e.g. guilds) and
public ones (e.g. armies).
Legal
systems, most of all Roman law, provided the most comprehensive and powerful
formal regulatory frameworks for economic transactions in the Roman
empire. Property law protected private holdings in varying degrees--as
full ownership, possession, usufructs, and servitudes. The law of obligations
stipulated how legitimate claims and dues could be created and extinguished.
Inheritance law regulated the transmission of property rights, claims and
obligations between generations. Procedural law provided ways to settle disputes
and enforce agreements.
Scholars
have debated the practical usefulness of Roman law for economic agents.
Pre-roman legal systems—indigenous, ethnic (for instance Jewish), or
Hellenistic—continued in use in the provinces until Roman citizenship was
universalized with the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212 CE. Merchants and
businessmen in the provinces were confronted with a mosaic of different legal
frameworks and legal statuses. Some argue that the absence of state-provided
protection of private property rights and the lack of state-provided contract
enforcement implied that the law only provided a discursive and normative
framework, while legal enforcement would have depended on the more or less
voluntary submission by litigants, propped up by social pressures and
self-help.
In this
workshop we want to look closely at the actual legal processes that regulated
economic activities and how they interrelated with social practice.
Key-note
speakers include Boudewijn Sirks, Dennis Kehoe, Hannah Cotton, Elisabeth Hermann-Otto,
Peter Sarris
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