Volume 142, Issue 1

In several Attic court speeches and in various contexts, the plaintiffs invoke the fact that what someone has declared should be valid. This νόμος, a variation of which is also found in Plato or Aristotle, has often been interpreted as a law on freedom of contract. However, a closer analysis of the passages makes it clear that the speaker arguing in favour of compliance with the law of homology is not concerned with the validity of contracts. The ὁμολογία, a unilateral declaration, rather refers to an individual contractual clause, but is also used in the non-contractual area, for example to defer a payment. On the basis of this result, a comparison of the law of homology with the uti lingua nuncupassit -sentence (12 Tab 6,1), which Egon Weiß suggested as early as 1923 in a short note, can be undertaken. However, the comparison of the two laws is not limited to the linguistic-syntactic level, but also clearly reveals functional and content-related parallels between ὁμολογία and nuncupatio .

The culmination of the ancient rhetorical education was controversia , a mock legal speech designed to train students for the courtroom. Nevertheless, both ancient Roman intellectuals and modern scholars have frequently observed that the activity underwent a transformation into a form of entertainment for adults, thereby undermining its efficacy as a practical legal training. This study examines the Controversiae by Elder Seneca and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria with a focus on the character–making and construction of character motives by declamatores , with the aim of revaluing the practical aspect of controversia . In composing a controversia , students should construct detailed characters and their motives from a short but typologically informative theme in order to create a plausible narrative for their own position. By repeatedly constructing fictitious but persuasive storylines, students gain a concrete understanding of character typology and the motives typically associated with each character. This enables the future advocates to identify pertinent facts and to search for appropriate proofs in actual courtrooms, where judges and jurists are also trained in controversia .

Roman legal documents must have existed in huge numbers in everyday life, but due to the perishable nature of writing materials they are nowadays extremely rare. Therefore, every new find represents an enrichment per se . In the following, the third and last tablet of a mancipatory will from AD 371 is presented. This will is of extraordinary importance for our knowledge of Roman testamentary practice in late antiquity.

This paper presents the first in-depth analysis of the six-line Greek epigram found as a paratext to the Digest in the Codex Florentinus. A discussion of its palaeography, authorship and dating, as well as of the genre issues it raises, is followed by a detailed verse-by-verse commentary.

The article deals with three legal enactments of the Frankish kings Chlothovech, Childebert I and Chlothachar I. It analyses the manuscript tradition of each of the three legal enactments and offers an interpretation of their content, which differs in many respects from the previous understanding. It also attempts to show that these legal documents were not written in ‘Merovingian Latin’, but rather that the royal chancelleries endeavoured to use Latin that was orthographically and grammatically correct according to late antique standards. All three legal texts are also newly edited on the basis of the manuscript tradition (pp. 326, 390, 420).

The term ‘Pandektistik’ is often used in a pejorative sense to describe a formalistic and positivistic jurisprudence. Jhering’s critique of the ‘Begriffsjurisprudenz’ at the turn of the century was decisive in consolidating this image. Today we know that this criticism was exaggerated. The central question here is whether or not there was a typical ´pandektistische Methode´ that was expression of this conceptual legal science. Traditionally, the answers have been rather one-sided: either from a historical-scientific point of view, with little or no consideration of dogmatics, or from a dogmatic approach, largely ignoring the scientific context. The present work follows a kind of ‘Problemgeschichte’, which, starting from a legal concept (here the hereditas iacens), does not remain in its purely dogmatic structure, but opens up to a comprehensive analysis on different levels (treatment of Roman legal sources, relation to Usus modernus and Natural law, systematic and praxis) in a comparative consideration of the authors (Savigny, Puchta, Jhering, Windscheid). The emphasis on dogmatics, understood in a broad sense as the reflection of a discursive reality that is not only ‘purely legal’, makes it possible to isolate the particular working strategy and to conclude, if only provisionally, whether or not there was a characteristic method of the Pandektenwissenschaft.

The late 19th century literature on fiducia is strongly marked by the fundamental contributions of Lenel. He identified, in his extensive work reconstructing the institution, passages in the Digest where the Justinian compilers would have substituted the mention of fiducia for that of both pignus and depositum vel commodatum. By contrast, the literature of recent years on the subject has often taken a more cautious approach to the problem of interpolations, limiting itself mainly to using sources not from the Corpus iuris. However, this doctrinal approach does not help to give a complete idea of such a complex institution.

Until recently, no one knew that a basement in Brazil sheltered the first complete translation of the Digest of Justinian into Portuguese, crafted from 1896 to 1915 by Conselheiro Vasconcellos, a remarkable and previously unknown Brazilian judge and jurist. This appears to be the only complete translation of the Digest composed in Latin America hitherto, and it is one of only seven completed by a single person. Books 1–27 of Vasconcellos’s version, based on the Mommsen/Krüger edition, have already been published in Brazil. This article tells the story of finding, editing, revising, and publishing the manuscript. It also assesses and reviews the quality of the Vasconcellos translation.

This article argues that Romanists can use regression analysis to isolate differences in juristic corpora, even within unrepresentative samples of juristic writing like the Digest. In particular, I show that Severan jurists were approximately three times as likely as their predecessors to cite imperial legal decisionmaking using anonymous forms. I argue that this change in citational practice responded to the turbulent imperial politics of the early third century C.E., while also laying the groundwork for the institutionalizing maneuvers of the later third and fourth.

The vivid formulation of the stipulatio -clause in Greek legal documents of Byzantine Egypt can be regarded by some scholars as an indication of its actual execution by the contracting parties. Nonetheless, the vividness of the clause seems to be an outcome of the notaries’ proclivity to legal pleonasm, repetition and meaning complementarity. These rhetorical elements applied in the clause highlight its legal characteristics and prerequisites, thereby persuading the reader of the ‘romanized’ character of the document. In other words, the stipulatio -clause is formulated as if it were executed for rhetorical purposes.

The article, written on the occasion of the publication of the Sourcebook on Byzantine Law, by Daphne Penna/Rosa Meijering, provides an overview of scholarly introductions to Byzantine law and discusses their merits and shortcomings. Above all, Byzantine law must finally be recognized in its independence – also in relation to Roman law. The new sourcebook takes a step in this direction and offers a reliable presentation of the sources of Byzantine law up to the 15 th century, which covers a number of desiderata and is also recommended to any legal historian for its accurate characterization of the basilicas and their scholia.