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Abstract:
Why is Roman law so boring? In this book, Zachary Herz argues that the bureaucratic, positivistic world of Roman law is not a distraction from the violent autocracy of the Roman empire, but an imagined escape. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and even emperors used legal writing to think about worlds that were safer or fairer than the one in which they lived. This archive of political imagination slowly became a law-code, and now guides readers through a legal system about which its authors could only dream. From Augustus to Justinian, this book shows how law symbolized order in chaotic times, and how that symbol eventually took on a life of its own. From the enlightened judgements of Hadrian to the great jurists and child rulers of Severan Rome, Herz reveals what Romans were really talking about when they talked about law.
On the author:
Zachary Herz, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Table of contents:
Introduction: Did Romans Have Law?Two Kinds of Thinking About Hay Slouching Towards BolognaCicero and the Talking LawPart I: Nevertheless, We Live According to the Laws1. Augustus and the Birth of Imperial LegalityLaw and Laughter, After ActiumRestoring the New OrderLampreys and the Higher LawSex and the Imperial Subject2. The Emperors Who Obeyed the Law: Vespasian, Titus, TrajanThe Power of Vespasian's LawPredictability, Paternity, and the Emperor TitusLaw as Imperial Etiquette: The Case of Pliny3. Letters from a God: Hadrian and the Rescript SystemHadrian's RevolutionThe Perpetual EdictThe Right of Response and Juristic CentralizationThe Rescript SystemRescripts and the Language of PowerPart II: Law Without Order4. Inheritance, Authority, and Alexander Relabeling of Legal Correspondence Methodology: How to Do Things with JustinianThe Rule of PrecedentLaw in a World of Children5. Juristic Reasoning, Citational Practices, and Law at the End of an EmpireBrilliant CogsA Severan Notion of Goodness Citation, Anonymity, and RegicidePart III: New Rules6. Towards Late-Antique Legalities Settled Law in Unsettled Times Codification: Indexing SovereigntyHow to Build a Rechtsstaat Without Really TryingThe Afterlife of the Severan Jurists7. The Embodiment of the Civil Law"The Whole of the Ancient Law:" The Corpus Iuris Ciuilis in Justinian's Words Why Imperial Constitutions Look Nicer in RetrospectThe Death of a Crossdresser and the Life of a TreatiseThe Law, EnsouledConclusion: What We Talk About When We Talk About Roman LawThe Lawyer in the MaelstromWhat Law Does InsteadAppendix 1 Juristic Citations of Imperial Lawmaking in the DigestAppendix 2 Precedential Reasoning in the Codex JustinianusAppendix 3 Rule-Consequentialist Reasoning in the DigestBibliographyIndex of TermsIndex of Sources
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