Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition. Clifford Ando

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       Preface

      The civil law was an instrument of empire. It was not, or was not simply, as Roman legal philosophers claimed, a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation and approved by the citizen body for use strictly over itself. On the contrary, many of its most characteristic features—the substructure of formal mechanisms whereby innovation was accomplished in practice and justified in theory; its concern with philosophy of language and the apparatus by which that concern was given expression; its very historical selfconsciousness—developed in response to the challenges posed when the Latinate legal system of the single and singular polity of Rome was deployed so as to embrace, incorporate, and govern discrepant people and cultures far afield. This volume attempts to vindicate that position; it illustrates what seem to me significant contours of some, at least, of the problems it raises; and it invites conversation on its themes.

      The argument falls into two parts. Chapters 1 and 2 sketch a history of the processes whereby lawyers at Rome, in statute and jurisprudence, grappled with the legal pluralism of the world imperial action had created. They are not narrowly an effort to describe practice. (I—and others—are taking up that challenge elsewhere.) Nor do I offer a history of positive law, of legal doctrine, on marriage or dowry or contract or some similar issue, from some antecedent moment when Roman law really was Roman to some late ancient date when it was not. I eschew that problem in part because histories of doctrine abound, and in part because what interests me are rather the means by which Roman lawyers naturalized such changes as did occur, such that civil-law doctrine of late antiquity on marriage, dowry, and contract could easily and legitimately be described as Roman, regardless of the source and nature of the changes it had undergone.

      Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine the relationship between civil, public, and international law in the Roman tradition. Though the latter two categories occupy positions of prestige in ancient and modern legal theory, neither was codified in antiquity. Partly in consequence, neither became the object of jurisprudential scrutiny; nor did either develop an autonomous tradition of argument or interpretation. On the contrary, in the ancient, medieval, and early modern Roman traditions, it was the civil law that provided conceptual resources to those others and whose actions proved paradeigmatic in the articulation of public and international law. At the same time, the manifold implications of the civil law in those systems of domination—its use as archetype in political and legal argument outside its own narrow sphere—opened the door to its own subversion. For when political turmoil at Rome upended its institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended its democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed; and by metaphorical recursion, forms of imperial domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.

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