Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

rules of ownership and possession, respectively. The third sec tion will then discuss how the two notions were brought closer together over time. The next chapter will discuss some kinds of rights over property that are less expansive than ownership and possession.

Ownership

Ownership is, as we just noted, a set of rights over a piece of property. In Roman law, the owner of something has nearly absolute and exclusive rights over it. Later in this chapter (and especially in the next), we will see some of the complications hiding in the word “nearly,” but to start, let us say that the owner has total authority to use, destroy, or “alienate” (i.e., sell or give away) his property. Following on this definition, the most important questions about ownership, then, are how does one become an owner in theory, and how does one prove it in practice? If something does not already have an owner, you can gen erally just claim it as your own. There are, of course, complica tions, but the situation doesn’t actually arise often (catching wild animals would probably be the most common instance), so we can just leave this first approximation alone. Somewhat more important is the rule that additions to an already-owned object belong to the original owner. So, for instance, you get to keep the fruit from your trees, the offspring of your livestock, and even land that builds up along any riverbank property you

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