Roman Law

Abstract

Many live under Roman law and do not know it. They think they live under the German Civil Code, the equity of the common law, a civil code of a Latin American land. Or they think that at least for law, other than the private law and its procedure, they live under their own code of penal procedure, under the vigour of the European Convention of Human Rights, or under their own constitution. Yet all these different systems share with each other that in one way or another, to a greater or a lesser extent, they represent the legacy of a legal system and science, unique already in Antiquity, that became the common legal discourse for Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, has provided Europe with its common law (ius commune — also known as Civil law), and has been encapsulated in various ways in different national codifications. That was possible because the local legal systems were rather rudimentary, while Roman law rules could fill these gaps and as a legal system could easily be superimposed as a system on those local customs and laws. As such it was capable of making an impression on them and was transmitted into them relatively unchanged.