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.
