The Invention of Law in the West

by Schiavone, Aldo; Carden, Jeremy; Shugar, Anthony

• ISBN13: 9780674047334
• ISBN10: 0674047338
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-02
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

Law is a specific form of social regulation that is distinct from religion, ethics, and even politics, and is endowed with a strong and autonomous rationality. The invention of law, a crucial aspect of Western history, took place in ancient Rome. Aldo Schiavone, a world-renowned classicist, reconstructs this process with clear-eyed passion, following its track and structure over the centuries, setting out from the earliest origins and moving up to the threshold of Late Antiquity. The consolidation of the Roman Empire reinforced this foundational movement. The Empire, after all, was marked by an unprecedented accumulation of power capable of creating the conditions for transforming an archaic predisposition to ritual into an unrivaled science and technology for the control of human relations.Schiavone offers us a closely reasoned interpretative essay, set against the vast backdrop of a thousand years of Roman history. He returns us to the primal origins of Western juridical machinery and the discourse that was constructed around it-formalism, the pretense of neutrality, the relationship with political power. This is a landmark work of scholarship whose influence will be felt by classicists, historians, and legal scholars for years to come.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. viii
The Tradition and the History
Roman Law and the Modern West	p. 3
History Rediscovered	p. 19
The Jurists in Rome	p. 31
The Birth of a Technique
Origins	p. 45
Kings, Priests, Wise Men	p. 64
Rituals and Prescriptions	p. 74
The Model of Statutory Law	p. 85
The Logos of the Republic	p. 105
Science, Forms, Dominion
Preservation and Change in the Age of Conquest	p. 131
his civile and die Praetors: The Idea of Fairness	p. 133
Oraiity and Writing	p. 154
The Building of Legal Science: From Quintus Mucius To Servius And Cicero	p. 175
The Quest for Order	p. 177
The New Paradigm: Abstraction and Formalism	p. 169
An Aristocratic Theology	p. 226
A Separate Reason: Entities, Rules, Cases	p. 245
Politics and Destiny	p. 270
Legitimacy and Power: The Doctrine of Natural Law	p. 285
In the Heart of the Empire
The Compromise and the Alliance: From Labeo to Gaius and Pomponius	p. 309
Hermeneutics and the Politics of Law	p. 311
The Definition of Characteristics	p. 338
Jurists and Emperors	p. 367
The Government: Ulpian	p. 391
The Great Systematization	p. 393
The Custodians of Law	p. 416
Equality Ancient and Modern	p. 449
Abbreviations	p. 463
Notes	p. 465
General Index	p. 585
Index of Sources	p. 607
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