Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Sources for Roman Law

Technical Sources (Reference)

Despite these problems, scholars have been able to reconstruct a remarkable amount of information about Roman law. In this section and the next, I will discuss technical sources, that is, documents produced by or for legal experts or at least as part of the legal process. These technical sources will be further divided into reference texts (those designed to record and explain the law in general) and documentary ones (i.e., docu ments actually used as part of particular transactions). Then, in the last section, I will discuss nontechnical sources – what information can we get from texts that were not originally meant to be “legal” such as histories, plays, and letters? The texts of the majority of Roman statute laws are lost to us, and for the remainder we generally have only partial quotations or paraphrase. The best-preserved single law from the Republic comes to us inscribed on a broken bronze plaque. We can tell from the shape of the remains that less than half the text survives. A few imperial enactments are better pre served and/or found in more than one copy, but the general situation is not really any better. Moreover, the best-preserved texts often have a limited, local application. A provincial city would have good reason to publish an imperial decree freeing it from taxation, but no community would have a similar rea son to spend a lot of time and money to inscribe the legal rules regarding theft. Far more common than the preservation of large fragments on stone or bronze is the quotation of a few words or sentences in the juristic works to be discussed later.

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