Legal Artifices: Ten Essays on Roman Law in the Present Tense

The first English-language anthology of Yan Thomas, whose contributions to Roman law revolutionised legal scholarship

• Collects and translates 10 essays by Yan Thomas (1943–2008), the most renowned French jurist of the 20th century
• Provides a juridical perspective on the genealogy of the Western subject and the elementary conditions for the exercise of power
• Builds on the growing interest in Thomas’ work generated by recent engagements, such as in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series
• Demonstrates the formal continuity of socio-legal techniques that have defined Western legal culture

Western legal professionals habitually rely on a version of legal history that bolsters their own sway over the present. The legal mythologies undergirding these self-serving proposals are divided between doctrines of law’s immemorial nature, and of its sacred (Roman) origins. Thomas’s de-mythicised jurisprudence, presented in this collection of essays, dismisses these sagas. His work sent seismic waves across the humanities and social sciences, with claims including:

• Law is not a set of rules, but the operation of legal arguments; lawyers are the agents of the legal denaturalisation of the world
• Rome is misread as an essentially political entity; the effect exercised on Roman society by its jurists ranks before that of its politicians
• Despite a widely accepted opposition between modern labour law and the Roman renting-out of a slave's workforce, there exist unexpected commonalities
• ‘Legal order’ and ‘responsibility’ are among the inventions of modern law; they are not part of the timeless inventory of the world