Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Legal Education

second century ad, also tells us explicitly of a nearly contempo rary legal school, attached to a man named Cassius, that is prob ably identical with the “Sabinian” school, and at the very least represents a distinct school of the educational sort. Two other writers of roughly the same period allude to teaching centers in Rome, which may well also be educational institutions. Finally, from the middle of the second century, we have a surviving introductory legal textbook – Institutes – in four “books.” (An ancient “book” is roughly equivalent to a long chapter today.) This was written by a jurist known only by his first name, Gaius. It is a broad but terse summary of much of Roman civil law. We also know of an apparently very similar work from the first half of the first century by Masurius Sabinus, the name sake of the Sabinian school. Either book would have to have been accompanied by considerable oral instruction of some type, again pointing to an organized school. While the evi dence gives us some confidence in the existence of law schools, only Gaius tells us much about how they operated. Presumably there were lectures. There could have been discussion of a more Socratic sort. There is no evidence for discussion of historical cases as in modern law schools. There could have been “mock trial” exercises, though the evidence for those is as a part of the schools of rhetoric, not of law. In short, we don’t know what the students were required to do or to produce. Whatever the details of procedure in the schools, several big-picture issues can be raised about them. The first has to do with the many famous jurists associated with the two named schools. Teaching in Rome had traditionally been a job for

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