Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

potential beneficiaries into a few categories (the details varied over time). If there was no one in the first category, or if all the people in the first category refused the inheritance, then those in the second category would have a chance, and so on. Within each category it was sometimes important to measure “degree” of relationship. This was just a matter of counting how many links there were between two people on the family tree. So, for instance, siblings are two degrees apart from each other (one link up, one back down), while first cousins are four degrees apart. It will be easier to see how this works by looking at the rules in a little more detail, and that will require talking about the historical development and about two important points of Roman family law. As for historical development, we can say for our purposes there were three sets of rules over time: the statutory rules, the praetorian rules, and the imperial ones, in that order. The main point of family law to note here is that for inheri tance purposes, children are descended from their father, but not (at least originally) from their mother. (See Chapter 17 for a broader perspective on family law, and in particular the difficul ties defining “family.”) Note that this is not a matter of discrim ination against women as such; it means that (at least originally) a woman’s “real” family was the one she was born into, not the one created by her marriage. This same structure is reflected in the existence of a category of relatives called “agnates,” a word that exists in English only to translate the Latin agnatus . These are persons who are both descended from the same male ancestor and through men only. (The intermediate steps have to

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