Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Law in the Provinces

Foreign Effects on Roman Law

Most of the discussion so far in this chapter has been about choosing legal systems. Will a Roman or non-Roman court hear a particular case? Will that court follow Roman or local legal traditions? Who gets to decide? These kinds of sharp either/ or distinctions seem to be typical of the interaction between Roman law and other legal systems, but things did not always work that way. There are also cases where we can see combi nations and modifications of multiple systems. In general, this seems to have been more a matter of practice than of theory. That is to say, Roman officials and jurists rarely admitted out side influence, but documents of individual transactions in the real world show clear traces of it. Now, given this mismatch between theory and practice, we do not know how success ful the hybrid forms were. Perhaps parties who tried to use partially “foreign” law were laughed out of Roman courts. But there are enough examples in the records of experienced users of the law to suggest that at least some bits of non-Roman law established a place for themselves among the Romans. Because of the general lack of recognition of foreign law in Roman texts, it is hard to give a general account. Instead, I will discuss four concrete examples. My first two examples are also among the few where “offi cial” sources are illuminating: rules for burial and surveil lance of pregnant women. Both cases are relatively simple in that they involve transfer of large blocks of law at once. As we saw in Chapter 20, Roman law observed several categories

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