Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

are designed to protect values external to the law itself. The consensual contracts govern common, important commercial transactions. They bring a predictability to these situations, which encourages economic activity. Moreover, elite Roman culture tended to talk of such commerce as morally difficult. All the more reason, then, to impose certain standards of fair dealing by law. At the same time, the means of achieving those ends tended to follow a logic internal to the law. Old forms of contract were never abolished, even if obsolete, and hence became part of the accumulation. That accumulation may also have encouraged the (already existing) conservatism of the legal community in retaining old categories like formal versus consensual and strict law versus good faith. Hence, the Romans never developed a streamlined theory of contract in general, but kept to their sets of contracts.

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