BOOK REVIEW: Joshua GETZLER, on The making of modern property: reinventing Roman law in Europe and its peripheries 1789–1950 by Anna di Robilant (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1, June, pp. 138-145)

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In this ambitious monograph Anna di Robilant describes how European jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew from the doctrines of Roman classical law and ius commune traditions in order to craft a new ‘Romanist-bourgeois’ form of property. She shows how a succession of gifted scholars steeped in Roman legal tradition produced a concept of property as dominium or absolute command, designed to secure the widest possible control of resources by individual owners. The hallmark of this dominium was the power to assign and dispose of assets as expressions of subjective right grounded in the free will of the autonomous owner. This juridical project of Romanist-bourgeois property joined to an ideological inheritance drawn from idealist philosophy (Kant, Hegel) and political economy (Smith, the Physiocrats), according to which a person’s interests were best expressed by choice of conduct in relation to external things and persons, yielding property and obligations as the basic legal building blocks of society. Each of these streams of liberal thought – the legal, the philosophical, and the economic – emphasized the benign operation and interaction of the wills of autonomous actors who could, within the guidance of a modernised legal order, constitute a cooperative society based on voluntary relations between equals. On di Robilant’s account, Romanist-bourgeois property as individualised dominium was not only projected as a positive contribution to freedom in a well-ordered society; it was also an act of creative destruction, aiming to clear away illiberal obstacles left over from the past. Romanist-bourgeois property would dissolve or displace the older feudal forms of holding that were associated with hierarchy, inequality, domination, and inefficiency, and permit the forces of capital and labour to interact with utmost freedom and rationality. Like modern economic analysts of the law today, Roman-bourgeois theory appealed to a lofty sense of autonomy, allied to a yen for efficiency and prosperity.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. 

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2500208