Periodic Reporting for period 5 - SIR (Scriptores Iuris Romani. Texts and Thought.)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-12-01 do 2022-07-31
Law is an essential element of the Western societies and, today, of the global world. The analysis of its birth leads us to the core of a really impressive experience: the Roman empire – the first “world” empire in history – with its extraordinary and so far unequalled capacity for generating order from power, and not only crushing force, dominion and asymmetry. Knowledge of that history is, therefore, a basic factor in the formation of the new generations of European citizens.
The aim of our project has been to create the basis of a new approach to the entire history of Roman law: an approach centred not on Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis, as was usual for centuries, but on the contributions by the Roman jurists, singularly considered. This approach has considerably improved our understanding of the cultural and social origins of Western legal science and its conceptual framework.
The jurists were the authentic protagonists of Roman legal culture, but this did not prevent the oblivion of their profiles, after Justinian’s codification. Actually, for a long time, the Digesta were perceived as a code and not as an anthology of jurisprudential writings, and were regarded as a unitary legislative apparatus, and not as a collection of fragments by different legal experts. This fact has entailed the loss of the historical dimension of that experience. We have aimed at recovering it, by analysing and publishing the texts contained in the Digesta, author by author and work by work, in a series of volumes personally supervised, and partly written, by the PI.
The aim of our project has been to create the basis of a new approach to the entire history of Roman law: an approach centred not on Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis, as was usual for centuries, but on the contributions by the Roman jurists, singularly considered. This approach has considerably improved our understanding of the cultural and social origins of Western legal science and its conceptual framework.
The jurists were the authentic protagonists of Roman legal culture, but this did not prevent the oblivion of their profiles, after Justinian’s codification. Actually, for a long time, the Digesta were perceived as a code and not as an anthology of jurisprudential writings, and were regarded as a unitary legislative apparatus, and not as a collection of fragments by different legal experts. This fact has entailed the loss of the historical dimension of that experience. We have aimed at recovering it, by analysing and publishing the texts contained in the Digesta, author by author and work by work, in a series of volumes personally supervised, and partly written, by the PI.
Owing to the breadth of the Digesta, we could not propose a complete restitution of Roman legal thought: a work that, with the criteria adopted, would have required the publication of no less than a hundred volumes. Therefore, we have focused our attention on some periods and some jurists.
With regard to the Republican age, we have chosen two moments: the birth of the first legal wisdom between the sixth and second centuries BC. (Scriptores iuris Romani, vol. 3, and Subsidia, vol. 2) and then its transformation into an authentic ancient science (SIR, vol. 1).
This has allowed us to reconstruct the cultural and political context in which the first legal science of the West and the first formal law in western legal tradition were formed.
As regards the period of Principate, we have focused our attention on the Severan age. We have taken into consideration not only Ulpian and Paul, with their important works, but also other jurists of that period, such as Callistratus, Macer, Marcianus and Modestinus. In that crucial epoch, as a response to the crisis that would have ended up devouring the entire ancient world, we can single out the emergence of the sketch of an organisation previously unknown in the ancient world: the bureaucratic and absolutist state. Jurists, and especially Ulpian, tried to impose on it the seal of legality, to reconcile absolutism and the rule of law: a line that would have arrived until the French Revolution.
This approach has also allowed us to propose a new vision of the relationship between imperial legislation and the work of the jurists.
We have also paid attention to some interesting jurists of the second century: Neratius, Gaius, Pomponius, Papyrus Justus and Cervidius Scaevola.
In fact, the second century experienced the construction of an imperial order based on a network of local autonomy and self-government, which favored the birth of an elite in charge of the world government, from Britain to Syria, with a prince "master of the world" but respectful of law and legality: the model of modern absolutism and its theorists, from Hobbes to Kant.
As for methodology and interdisciplinary, our most significant developments have been, on the one hand, a strong integration of our research in the context of historiography on the ancient world and, on the other, a construction of a closer relationship with legal theory and with law studies in general, taking into account both private and public law.
This has made clear the intrinsically multidisciplinary and frontier nature of the research on Roman law, if carried out in correct and rigorous terms.
With regard to the Republican age, we have chosen two moments: the birth of the first legal wisdom between the sixth and second centuries BC. (Scriptores iuris Romani, vol. 3, and Subsidia, vol. 2) and then its transformation into an authentic ancient science (SIR, vol. 1).
This has allowed us to reconstruct the cultural and political context in which the first legal science of the West and the first formal law in western legal tradition were formed.
As regards the period of Principate, we have focused our attention on the Severan age. We have taken into consideration not only Ulpian and Paul, with their important works, but also other jurists of that period, such as Callistratus, Macer, Marcianus and Modestinus. In that crucial epoch, as a response to the crisis that would have ended up devouring the entire ancient world, we can single out the emergence of the sketch of an organisation previously unknown in the ancient world: the bureaucratic and absolutist state. Jurists, and especially Ulpian, tried to impose on it the seal of legality, to reconcile absolutism and the rule of law: a line that would have arrived until the French Revolution.
This approach has also allowed us to propose a new vision of the relationship between imperial legislation and the work of the jurists.
We have also paid attention to some interesting jurists of the second century: Neratius, Gaius, Pomponius, Papyrus Justus and Cervidius Scaevola.
In fact, the second century experienced the construction of an imperial order based on a network of local autonomy and self-government, which favored the birth of an elite in charge of the world government, from Britain to Syria, with a prince "master of the world" but respectful of law and legality: the model of modern absolutism and its theorists, from Hobbes to Kant.
As for methodology and interdisciplinary, our most significant developments have been, on the one hand, a strong integration of our research in the context of historiography on the ancient world and, on the other, a construction of a closer relationship with legal theory and with law studies in general, taking into account both private and public law.
This has made clear the intrinsically multidisciplinary and frontier nature of the research on Roman law, if carried out in correct and rigorous terms.
Thanks to this project, which advances the research developed by the PI for more than 30 years, we are able to consider the foundations of law in the West in a completely new light: not as a code outside of time, but as a work in progress, immersed in different historical periods and influenced by changing tensions, which were conditioned, from time to time, by politics, power relations and cultural orientations.
The most important result of our project has been the publication of the series Scriptores iuris Romani. Between 2016 and 2022 we published 19 volumes, to which must be added 4 volumes of Subsidies (a complementary series) and 4 volumes of Proceedings of our conferences: a total of 27 books, for over 9000 pages. This has gone far beyond our most optimistic expectations.
Dozens of scholars – mainly Italian, but also French, German and American – took place in this work, which may be certainly defined as imposing. The project has created the conditions for a renewal of an intellectual tradition – studies on Roman law – that was very glorious in past European intellectual history, but now appears on sufferance almost everywhere, if not in open crisis, and reduced to the margins of both legal science and historical disciplines.
The most important result of our project has been the publication of the series Scriptores iuris Romani. Between 2016 and 2022 we published 19 volumes, to which must be added 4 volumes of Subsidies (a complementary series) and 4 volumes of Proceedings of our conferences: a total of 27 books, for over 9000 pages. This has gone far beyond our most optimistic expectations.
Dozens of scholars – mainly Italian, but also French, German and American – took place in this work, which may be certainly defined as imposing. The project has created the conditions for a renewal of an intellectual tradition – studies on Roman law – that was very glorious in past European intellectual history, but now appears on sufferance almost everywhere, if not in open crisis, and reduced to the margins of both legal science and historical disciplines.