The many territories of Roman law
Résumés
Depuis le xie siècle, l’étude du droit romain ancien présente des tendances ambivalentes. D’une part, le Corpus Iuris Civilis de Justinien constitue un exemple de droit sans territoire ni temporalité, car il a été réodapté, principalement à travers l’enseignement universitaire, comme droit en vigueur dans de nombreux États européens (et au-delà), tant au Moyen Âge qu’à l’époque moderne. D’autre part, lorsqu’il est replacé et étudié dans son contexte antique, il demeure le droit d’une région, aussi vaste que fût l’Empire romain. En outre, bien que son étude ait été, pendant des siècles, liée à la formation des juristes dans les facultés de droit, elle a également nécessité une approche philologique et historique pour permettre une reconstitution adéquate. Il constitue ainsi un exemple révélateur de la difficile relation entre une perspective ancrée dans un espace géographique et une perspective déterritorialisée et, surtout, entre spécialisation et interdisciplinarité. Bien qu’elle soit souvent perçue comme un champ disciplinaire traditionnel, l’histoire du droit romain – justement en raison de son héritage complexe et ambivalent – a également, à bien des égards, préfiguré les innovations méthodologiques contemporaines dans les sciences sociales et les humanités.
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The following text reproduces the lecture delivered at the conference “Knowledge and Know-How Situated: Humanities and Social Sciences and the World”, organized by the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at the Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers (8 - 10 November 2022). I am grateful to the organizers for their kind invitation and for the opportunity to engage with a stimulating line of inquiry. The conference’s emphasis on area studies prompted a brief reexamination of the history of Roman law and its historiography from an unusual angle. This article thus reflects the point de vue of a Roman legal historian rethinking the field in light of the epistemological questions introduced by area studies. As the topics addressed are both familiar to legal historians and not treated as central in themselves, but as instrumental to the reinterpretation outlined above, no detailed bibliography is provided; relevant literature can be accessed via L’Année Philologique.
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I. Introduction
- 1 G. Benoît, Repetitio in cap. Raynutius, de testamentis, Lyon, Barthélemy Vincent, 1575, 3 vol.
1In 276 CE, in the town of Oxyrhynchos, a man named Aurelius Hermogenes, also known as Eudaimon, dictated his will in Greek, naming his five children – three sons and two daughters – as his heirs. Aurelius’ estate consisted of vineyards and corn-land (P.Oxy. VI 907 = M.Chr. 317 = FIRA III 51). Over a millennium later, in early 16th-century Toulouse, the lawyer Guillaume Benoît, writing in Latin, retraced the rules concerning the succession to the French throne in a treaty which would influence subsequent historical events1.
2What are the commonalities between the private inheritance of a small landowner in late antique Egypt and the succession to the throne of France in the Renaissance? Both were regulated, or at least conceptually shaped, by the framework of Roman law.
3These two examples – so distant in time, place, and nature – illustrate the complexity inherent in any discussion of Roman law, particularly when approached through the lens of area studies, as this paper proposes. The wide geographic and cultural reach of Roman law – made even more striking by its lasting normative influence into the modern era – has given rise to a remarkably diverse body of scholarship. This paper sets out to explore some of its aspects, while also drawing attention to the paradox of Roman legal history: a discipline often perceived as traditional, yet one that in certain respects has anticipated recent methodological shifts in the social sciences and humanities.
II. An outline: the many lives (and meanings) of Roman law
- 2 For a comprehensive account, see e.g. F. Wieacker, Römische Rechtsgeschichte, 1-2, München, Beck, 1 (...)
- 3 The use of Greek in the composition of Roman wills was authorized by a constitution of Alexander Se (...)
4As a first step, let us sketch how the transplant of Roman law across both time and space occurred2. It originated as the law of a small village, Rome, in the Latium (today the capital of Italy), founded in the 8th century BCE. Rome then became the centre of a system of hegemony – which we call the Roman Empire (Imperium) – extending over a vast territory around the Mediterranean Sea, but also reaching present-day Britain and the north-western Arabian Peninsula. In 30 BCE, Egypt was subjugated to the power of Rome, following the defeat of Cleopatra by Octavian (later Augustus). For more than two centuries, the inhabitants of the inner regions of Egypt retained their own laws and status. In 212 CE, though, all inhabitants of the empire were given Roman citizenship, therefore Roman law became the general law of the whole Roman world. That is why some sixty years later, in 276, Aurelius Hermogenes in Oxyrhynchos dictated his will following Roman legal norms. And not only his will, but also his very name – incorporating that of the Emperor M. Aurelius (Caracalla), who conferred in 212 the Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Empire – shows the extent to which Roman law had been imposed as a global factor of uniformization3.
- 4 For an overview of this dissemination, tracing the threads of texts and the circulation of manuscri (...)
5Some 250 years later, in 529-534 CE, Emperor Justinian, in Constantinople (today Istanbul) collected Roman legal norms in three volumes (the Code, the Digest and the Institutes, to which he would later add the Novels) that are nowadays known as the Corpus Iuris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”). The very fact that Justinian released his Latin legal anthologies in Greek-speaking Constantinople shows that once again the geography of Roman law had changed. Soon translated into Greek (a further step of inculturation), Byzantine law remained in force in the eastern part of the Empire until the Fall of Constantinople in the 15th century (and certain elements of it endured within religious settings for a time). But what was to have more far-reaching consequences, is that the Corpus Iuris Civilis was in a sense rediscovered around the year 1000 in the West, and first gradually, then more rapidly, became the object of in-depth teaching and of meticulous and creative commentary, that disseminated its knowledge. The first centre of learning was in Bologna, Italy, at the end of the 11th century: a new educational institution, the University, was born around the reading of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. From Bologna, the universities – and the Corpus Iuris Civilis – spread to many regions, for instance to Montpellier and Orléans in France, before becoming an almost general phenomenon throughout Europe. Because of this, Roman law became the “common law” in many regions of Western and Central Europe, and was applied in courts and administration4.
6The causes of this “reception” were twofold: on the one hand, because of the ideological-political continuity that was established between the ancient Roman empire and the medieval Sacrum Romanum Imperium (whose monarchs believed themselves to be the successors of Justinian); on the other hand, because Roman law was thought to be highly rational and equitable, so that it deserved to be taught and implemented at par with other ancients authorities, like, to give some examples, the Bible, Aristotle or Hippocrates. In short, it was either adopted through governmental power (ratione imperii) or through the power of rational argument (imperio rationis) or through a combination of both, depending on relevant political backgrounds.
- 5 For a thoughtfully structured overview, see J.-L. Halpérin, Une histoire des droits dans le monde, (...)
7Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that, at the beginning of the 16th century CE, Guillaume Benoît, writing in Latin, found perfectly natural to retrace the rules concerning the succession to the French throne using categories and norms that are largely drawn from the Corpus Iuris Civilis. Important elements of Roman law persist in modern codifications, for example in Napoleon’s Code Civil and in the German Civil Code of 1900 (BGB), which in turn served as a template for many other civil codes, including those of Japan, Greece, Ukraine, China and Brazil5.
8“Roman law” is thus a locution that covers many phenomena. First, it can be seen in the context of the ancient society that produced it; even in this framework, though, it can be studied either as the law of a single city in Latium, or it can be investigated in its diffusion and reinterpretation in the many regions around the Mediterranean, and over a period of thirteen centuries (from Romulus to Justinian).
9Second, Roman law is identified with the Corpus Iuris Civilis, i.e. with a specific textual body, and its history thus becomes the history of the reinterpretations, applications, struggles, refutations, and influences that the Corpus Iuris Civilis has provoked from the 11th century to the present, in almost every continent. In this second sense, Roman law is used as a code-word for the (mostly) Western legal tradition, also known as “civil law”. The two meanings pave the way to quite different scholarships.
III. Epistemological short circuits: law over time
- 6 F.C. von Savigny, De la vocation de notre temps pour la législation et la science du droit, trad fr (...)
10A first consequence of this situation affects present-day scholars (in fact, it has affected scholars since the Bolognese rediscovery of the Corpus Iuris Civilis). If all research in the social sciences and humanities is, by nature, “situated”, this is even more true for the study of Roman law, which stands both as a historical object and as a living influence on contemporary legal thought. As Friedrich Carl von Savigny, has put it, Roman law establishes a vital connection between past and present6. This sentiment creates a kind of epistemological grey zone, where past and present are difficult to disentangle. It is hard for researchers to look at Roman law with the necessary detachment because it forms a more or less conscious part of their way of (ahistorically) conceiving any legal phenomenon. It is worth noting that in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and many Latin American and Balkan countries, Roman law is still being taught in Law schools as an integral part of the training of present-day lawyers. Hence the difficulty of looking backwards and studying it not genealogically (as a precedent and living part of our own legal systems), but archaeologically, as pertaining to a given society of the past, to be studied in context.
11Moreover, several factors currently contribute to the decline in the overall quality of Roman law teaching in Law schools – not least the diminishing knowledge of Latin and, more broadly, the waning interest in the classical ancient world, increasingly overshadowed by the rise of technologically oriented disciplines. The Roman past has faded from view, giving way to dominant presentism. The problem is that the Corpus Iuris Civilis remains nevertheless a subtext of many of today’s legal systems, and more generally a major pattern of reference for contemporary Western legal thought. The loss of knowledge of Roman law therefore paradoxically has the effect of complicating the detection, and where relevant the critique of, values and orientations that reach us from the past. Roman law, for instance, was framed with a distinctly anthropocentric focus, placing at its core the legal subject – an individual not subordinate to another’s authority, i.e. sui iuris – and the institution of ownership. From this perspective, the environment – encompassing the physical world and non-human living beings – was viewed as an almost inexhaustible resource to be exploited for human benefit. Only by recognizing this underlying framework, with all its nuances, can we grasp how deeply it continues to shape contemporary legal systems and thinking. For instance, this lasting influence may impede attempts to reshape the relationship between humans and the environment, such as granting legal standing to non-human entities, a notion that sits uneasily within civil law categories. A flawed understanding of Roman legal thought is also reflected in the frequent yet inaccurate association of 'the commons' with the Roman notion of res communes omnium.
IV. Law and territories
12The above outlined dissemination of Roman law, first in the ancient world, then in the medieval and modern times poses another problem, that we might call geographical, but that quickly affects the definition of the subject-matter itself. Roman law can be studied both in its “universality” (as an element of unification/uniformization/domination of the Roman world, of the medieval world, of the individual nation-states in the process of state-building, and recently also as a tool of harmonization in European private law) and, conversely, in its local declinations, i.e. in the encounter and clash with other (indigenous) laws on which it was superimposed (or that emerged in competition with it). We can again refer to the two examples we started from: in Egypt in the 3rd century CE, Roman law overlapped with local laws (Greek, Egyptian); in 16th-century France, it competed with customary law (and with canon law, royal ordinances, …). There are thus two directions that the study of Roman law (in all epochs) can take: the top-down approach (which prioritises Roman law as a unifying factor, imposed by a dominating power) and the bottom-up approach (which emphasises its interaction with indigenous systems).
13The second approach is nowadays mostly known under the paradigm of “legal pluralism”, i.e. a situation in which two or more legal systems coexist in the same social space. With the decline of nation states as the locus of political and legal power, traditional state-centred theory of law has understandably given way to a different paradigm. Initially depicted in colonial situations (in which the colonial power superimposed an external legal system over an existing one) legal pluralism is now understood as a characteristic of all legal systems.
- 7 See e.g. C. Humfress, “Thinking through Legal Pluralism: ‘Forum shopping’ in the Later Roman Empir” (...)
14In recent scholarship – mostly from US and UK – legal pluralism and bottom-up approach have become prevalent, as opposed to the focus on Roman law as a unifying factor (a consequence of it, the concept of “Romanisation” – for a long while understood as a process where native cultures are replaced with Roman culture – has been challenged, in favour of more dynamic notions such as acculturation, creolization, and negotiation of post-conquest identities). In the study of law, the aim of such perspective is to understand how indigenous law influenced the law of the “conquerors”. Obviously, as far as the ancient world is concerned, this approach is only feasible in areas where evidence of everyday legal life has survived; contracts and wills in the Roman Empire were recorded on perishable materials (waxed wooden tablets; papyri) that have survived, due to climatic reasons, in only a few places (e.g. in Egypt; Herculaneum and Pompeii; western regions of North Africa). Along with the idea that every legal system is intrinsically plural, categories such as forum shopping (the practice of litigants having their legal case heard in the court thought most likely to provide a favourable decision) or alternative arenas (putting law courts in a broader framework of formal and informal social institutions – family, neighbours, religious communities, etc. – through with people can resolve disputes without a legal trial) have become familiar to legal historians, not only in the English-speaking world where this anthropological turn mostly stems from7. The recent Conference of German-speaking Legal historians (Deutscher Rechtshistorikertag, at its 77th edition in 2022) also had pluralism as its leitmotiv.
15Consequently, Roman law is becoming less and less of a paradigm; it is no longer considered as “the embodiment of the law of reason”, a kind of “written natural law” (ratio scripta), as it was long held to be (suffice it to say that Roman law was the basis of Grotius’ natural law theories and to a large extent of modern human rights, despite the fact that Roman society recognised slavery as a legal institution: another example of the reuse the Corpus Iuris in new directions). If what matters now is its interaction with indigenous laws, Roman law becomes more and more historically situated. Roman law, in this bottom-up perspective, dissolves into a plurality of interactions, becomes a multifaceted whole, chronologically and geographically plural. It no longer lends itself to being presented as a single block. It also loses, in the eye of present-day researchers, its link with other components of the classical culture, for example with the thinking of Cicero or Seneca or Quintilian (with whom law was instead often related).
- 8 For the continued use of the writings of classical jurists in Late Antiquity, whose circulation is (...)
16This also entails the ever-decreasing weight given to “law in books”, i.e. to the law produced (on the basis of statutes and imperial norms also) by Roman jurists. Roman jurists were members of the aristocratic (and economic) elite that exercised, from the 3rd century BCE onward, the task of advising private individuals and magistrates and that produced a rich literature, collected by Justinian in the Digest, one of the volumes of the Corpus Iuris. Jurists’ law – which was the model for European “legal science” from the 11th to the 19th century – is downgraded, in this perspective, to only one of the many elements that contributed to ancient pluralism. It is not the case here to discuss whether or not this view provides us with a faithful account of the functioning of the legal system of the Roman-Mediterranean world8. What we are interested in highlighting here are the consequences of the reorientation of research from a previous top-down (universalist) approach towards the bottom-up (pluralist) model.
V. Pluralistic turn: a historic recurrence?
17Given the account presented thus far, one might be led to believe that the evolution of scholarship on Roman law has followed a linear trajectory: from a top-down approach – dominant from the 11th to the 19th or 20th century, when Roman law functioned as a kind of “common law” across many regions – to a more recent bottom-up perspective that is steadily gaining prominence. In other words, a shift from universalism to pluralism. It might also seem that this “pluralistic turn” has been influenced by postcolonial studies, marking a relatively recent methodological development that has challenged – and in some respects unsettled – a deeply rooted scholarly tradition.
18In reality, these new approaches have been preceded by an earlier phase, beginning as early as the 1890s, in which the notion of legal pluralism (under different names) had already been clearly and rigorously articulated by Roman legal historians. A key figure of this intellectual moment was Ludwig Mitteis (1859–1921), professor in Prague, Vienna, and Leipzig, whose groundbreaking book Reichsrecht and Volksrecht in den östlichen Provinzen des römischen Kaiserreichs (1891) shattered the traditional assumption, based on Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis, of a uniform legal order under the Roman Empire. Studying the extent to which indigenous laws and legal concepts remained alive under Roman rule, Mitteis already put “pluralism” (despite not using this very name) at the core of his research and opened a new field.
19Two key points deserve emphasis. First, the “discovery” of indigenous legal traditions in the Roman provinces was made possible by the emergence of papyrological evidence, which began to surface in significant quantities following the uncovering of substantial papyrus fragments in Egypt – particularly at sites like Arsinoe and Oxyrhynchus – during the 1880s and 1890s. Second, the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its mosaic of regions, languages, and legal systems – and the inherent tensions such pluralism entailed – heightened sensitivity among researchers to the layered and multifaceted character of imperial legal systems, both modern and ancient.
20The exploration of the relationship between Roman imperial law and local legal systems, first set in motion by Mitteis’ seminal book, continued vigorously up to the Second World War (and was in the meantime extended also to the study of the Western provinces of the Empire). The recent revival of this type of approach is, therefore, not unprecedented within the historiography of Roman law. It sometimes lacks the philological rigor of earlier scholarship, though it has gained from a more sophisticated conceptual framework, largely influenced by postcolonial studies.
21Another spill-over effect is noteworthy. The focus on “legal pluralism” at the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century went hand in hand with a process of intellectual budding: Roman law scholarship radiated into and helped shape several distinct yet interconnected disciplines.
- 9 See e.g. R. Cotterrell, “Leon Petrażycki and contemporary socio-legal studies”, International Journ (...)
22In particular, the roots of the “sociology of law” can be traced back to the works of Roman law scholars at the beginning of 20th century. Among these, a prominent place is taken by Leon Petrażycki and Eugen Ehrlich, both also active as scholars of Roman law (Max Weber was of course also a jurist by education). Ehrlich, namely, was prompted to his sociological approach by his experience of the legal pluralism (and the social rooting of law) in his native town of Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, in Ukraine) in the Duchy of Bukovina, at that time a province of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy9.
- 10 See e.g. R. Michaels, “The Functional Method of Comparative Law”, The Oxford Handbook of Comparativ (...)
23Comparative law also received a strong impetus: following the pioneering work of Henry James Sumner Maine – a British jurist and legal historian – whose book Ancient Law undertook a comparative examination of Western and Eastern legal traditions, many Roman law scholars (particularly those who were direct or indirect students of the aforementioned Ludwig Mitteis) began to integrate their research on Roman law with comparative legal studies. One need only mention Ernst Rabel, whose “function/context” methodology became a standard approach in comparative law in both Europe and the United States, where he was forced to emigrate due to Nazi racial laws10.
VI. Disciplinary boundaries and territories
- 11 See L'Humanisme juridique : aspects d’un phénomène intellectuel européen, ed. X. Prévost, L.-A. San (...)
24The transformation of scholarship does not only result in the emergence of new disciplinary branches. There has also been a readjustment within the more traditional disciplinary landscape. In particular, since the 15th century, a debate arose between those who believed that the Corpus Iuris Civilis should be studied with the methods of history and philology, and those who considered it a purely legal discipline. It is well known that in 1432, Lorenzo Valla – the brilliant philologist celebrated for his groundbreaking critique of the Donation of Constantine – was expelled from the Law faculty at Pavia (Italy) due to his challenge to the prevailing methodological assumptions of contemporary jurists. Guillaume Budé is another well-known advocate of this same philological trend. This methodological divide gave rise to two styles of scholarship, the mos italicus (“the Italian style”, more juridical) and the mos gallicus (“the French Style”, more open to history and philology, although it would be excessive to clearly oppose the two methods)11. These two approaches might be seen as reflecting a kind of polarization reminiscent of the contemporary divide between the social sciences and the humanities.
- 12 The interplay of legal and historical scholarship can be seen, for example, in The Oxford Handbook (...)
25Today, this divide appears to be resurfacing in a new and specific form. The growing focus on the complex interactions within the Roman provinces – necessitating careful consideration of historical and environmental contexts, as well as engagement with sources like papyri and inscriptions, whose analysis calls for specialized expertise – has contributed to a rising interest in Roman law among scholars of Classics12. As a result, they have to some extent taken over a role traditionally held by those trained in Law schools. Moreover, the growing interest for Roman law among US scholars is both stimulated and supported by a lesser dependence on the epistemological short-circuit mentioned above, as their training in the common law system – rather than in the civil law tradition – makes them less bound by the preconceptions of their own legal culture. In this framework, the current of “Law in literature” has found fertile ground in legal history, because Roman legal historians had long been accustomed to using literary sources (including Plautus’ theatre) to reconstruct ancient law.
26It cannot be overlooked that this shift toward new documentary sources and previously neglected (ancient) social strata has inevitably contributed to the erosion of Roman law’s long-held status as the embodiment of “the law of reason’” and as a universal, paradigmatic legal model.
VII. A historiographical reappraisal
- 13 See, for contrasting opinions, Roman Law and the Idea of Europe : Europe's Legacy in the Modern Wor (...)
27An important by-product of this multiple questioning of a long-established scholarly tradition is the growing interest in the history of historiography, i.e. in the study of the changing interpretations of past events in the works of individual scholars and of academical groups. This approach seeks – inter alia – to critically engage with the narratives of European heritage. For instance, recent research has focused on the emergence of the idea of Roman law as an idealized shared heritage, tracing its origins among exiled German scholars in Britain during the Nazi regime, as well as the German and Italian scholars who joined totalitarian regimes. The central claim is that the rise of the importance of Roman law was a reaction against the crisis of jurisprudence in the face of Nazi ideas of racial and ultra-nationalistic law, leading to the establishment of the idea of Europe founded on shared legal principles13.
VIII. Concluding remarks: backward and forward
28The study of Roman law - as marginal a discipline as it may seem - has been at the heart of European culture since at least the 11th century. The exploitation of Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis brought with it the birth of Universities, as an institution and as a teaching method. Apparently closed in its conservatism, the study of Roman law in fact anticipated some significant methodological turns. As early as the 15th century, it represented the battleground between two methods, one more philological, the other more juridical, which can be seen as anticipating, with some approximation, the distinction between humanities on the one hand and social sciences on the other. Then, since the 19th century, in the wake of papyrology and in the context of the dissolution of European Empires, it has early turned its attention on legal pluralism, and within this framework it has contributed to the emergence of disciplines such as sociology of law and legal comparative research.
- 14 See e.g. K. Harper, The Fate of Rome : Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, Princeton, Prince (...)
29Current trends in Roman legal history clearly mirror broader developments in historical research and the social sciences. Notably, an increasingly influential approach - analytical rather than synthetic, and holistic in nature - seeks to reconstruct the past through the accumulation of detailed data drawn from a wide range of disciplines. The Corpus Iuris Civilis is no longer the sole source taken into account, but rather all written documents, including those of everyday practice ; and not only textual data are drawn upon, but also iconographical, archaeological, and even palaeo-climatic evidence is exploited. This approach is certainly an enrichment, but it is also certainly affected by the influence of life sciences (and by quantitative approaches) on historical and social sciences14. Legal historians have also been closely influenced by the historical developments surrounding the use of ancient law as a form of 'common law' in force - and by its eventual decline.
30The study of Roman law thus serves as a telling example of the contextual conditioning that shapes any 'situated' discipline, but also - when the perspective is reversed - it offers a strategic vantage point for exploring long-term transformations in both socio-political structures and epistemic frameworks.
Notes
1 G. Benoît, Repetitio in cap. Raynutius, de testamentis, Lyon, Barthélemy Vincent, 1575, 3 vol.
2 For a comprehensive account, see e.g. F. Wieacker, Römische Rechtsgeschichte, 1-2, München, Beck, 1988-2023; concerning the principles of private law, Handbuch des Römischen Privatrechts, 1-3, ed. U. Babusiaux, C. Baldus, W. Ernst, F.-S. Meissel, J. Platschek, Th. Rüfner, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2023. In comparative perspective, see The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law, ed. C. Humfress, D. Ibbetson, P. Olivelle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024.
3 The use of Greek in the composition of Roman wills was authorized by a constitution of Alexander Severus see L.C. Colella, I testamenti dei cittadini romani d’Egitto tra storia sociale e prassi giuridica. Dal I secolo d.C. a Severo Alessandro, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2024.
4 For an overview of this dissemination, tracing the threads of texts and the circulation of manuscripts, see now Lire le droit du Moyen Âge. Comprendre et utiliser les sources juridiques (xiie-xve siècles), ed. E. Conte, L. Genton, Palermo, Palumbo, 2025.
5 For a thoughtfully structured overview, see J.-L. Halpérin, Une histoire des droits dans le monde, Paris, Cnrs, 2023.
6 F.C. von Savigny, De la vocation de notre temps pour la législation et la science du droit, trad fr. A. Dufour, Paris, PUF, 2006.
7 See e.g. C. Humfress, “Thinking through Legal Pluralism: ‘Forum shopping’ in the Later Roman Empir”, Law and Empire, ed. J. Duindam, J. Harries, C. Humfress, N. Hurvitz, Leiden, Brill, p. 225-250.
8 For the continued use of the writings of classical jurists in Late Antiquity, whose circulation is attested by papyri, see D. Mantovani, “Presenze della giurisprudenza classica nella tarda antichità: il progetto Redhis”, Pensiero e forme letterarie dei giuristi romani. Studi, III, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2024, p. 187-208.
9 See e.g. R. Cotterrell, “Leon Petrażycki and contemporary socio-legal studies”, International Journal of Law in Context, 11, 2015, p. 1-16; Eugen Ehrlich. Kontexte und Rezeptionen, ed. M. Auer, R. Seinecke, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2024.
10 See e.g. R. Michaels, “The Functional Method of Comparative Law”, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, ed. K. Zimmermann, M. Reimann, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 339-382.
11 See L'Humanisme juridique : aspects d’un phénomène intellectuel européen, ed. X. Prévost, L.-A. Sanchi, Paris, Garnier, 2022; R. Menini, L.-A. Sanchi, L'Antiquité selon Guillaume Budé. À l’école d’un humaniste érudit, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2025.
12 The interplay of legal and historical scholarship can be seen, for example, in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, ed. P.J du Plessis, C. Ando, K. Tuori, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020.
13 See, for contrasting opinions, Roman Law and the Idea of Europe : Europe's Legacy in the Modern World, dir. K. Tuori, H. Björklund, London et alibi, Bloomsbury, 2019 ; T. Giaro, « More Breaking News from Nazi Times », Studia Iuridica, 95, 2022, p. 140-149.
14 See e.g. K. Harper, The Fate of Rome : Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017, with the remarkable discussion of Ph. Roger, « Les germes, pas les Germains », La Critique, 864, 2019, p. 389-391.
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Dario Mantovani, « The many territories of Roman law », Clio@Themis [En ligne], 29 | 2025, mis en ligne le 20 novembre 2025, consulté le 23 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cliothemis/6514 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/156ot
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