The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law ed. by David Johnston

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law ed. by David Johnston Zachary Herz David Johnston (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 539. $36.99 (pb.). ISBN 978–0-521–71994–0. The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law serves as an excellent introduction to this highly technical subfield of Roman history, while offering a surprising amount to those already versed in the subject. As is the standard, the Companion is divided into short chapters, organized around a series of themes. The book breaks down roughly into three sections: Parts 1, 2, and 3 provide background on the surviving sources and intellectual context of Classical Roman law; parts 4 and 5 contain subject-matter-specific overviews of different legal topics covered in the Corpus Iuris Civilis; and part 6 discusses Roman law’s later reception. Each part includes several chapters, written by experts in a variety of fields. The Companion’s editor, David Johnston, has assembled a slate of distinguished scholars, including law faculty on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as traditional historians, classicists, and medievalists—although I should note that only two of the Companion’s nineteen contributors are women. The text that results from this confluence of perspectives is as insightful and useful as one would hope, albeit occasionally disjointed. Part 1 is largely prefatory, consisting of Johnston’s introduction and a thoughtful discussion by Laurens Winkel of the different analytic frameworks one might apply to Roman legal study. Winkel’s piece is a standout of the volume; such a complex topic requires a focused approach, and those who are beginning to study the field in earnest would be well advised to think seriously about the questions with which they hope to engage. Winkel’s brief history of [End Page 420] the major strands of Roman legal scholarship will also be enormously helpful to those entering the discipline. Part 2 discusses basic features of Roman law and legal production, with David Ibbetson providing a diachronic history of Roman lawmaking from the Twelve Tables to the fifth century ce, and John Richardson focusing more narrowly on the imposition of Roman law on provincial subjects from the late Republic on. Each piece is clarifying, although Ibbetson’s portrayal of the shift from juristic to imperial lawmaking cries out for more nuance than length and genre permit. Part 3 introduces the types of evidence on which scholars must rely in order to reconstruct Roman legal practice, and the different problems these sources present. Of these, Wolfgang Kaiser’s discussion of the Corpus Iuris Civilis is probably the most useful for the nonspecialist, since the Corpus makes up so much of our surviving legal material and presents so many specific problems. Those already immersed in the field, however, may particularly benefit from Caroline Humfress’s introduction to law and early Christian literature. Parts 4 and 5 (on private and public law respectively) perform a very different role than does the preceding material; these chapters are brief, descriptive overviews of doctrine. These sections of the Companion seem less essential, since this type of work has been done often and well: readers looking for straightforward introductions to Roman legal rules already have J. A. Crook’s Law and Life of Rome: 90 b.c.–a.d. 212 (Ithaca 1967), Jill Harries’ Law and Crime in the Roman World (Cambridge 2007), or David Johnston’s own Roman Law in Context (Cambridge 1999), plus innumerable casebooks and sourcebooks. The best contributions to this section take a more historical approach: in particular, Ernest Metzger’s chapter on litigation and procedure shows how Roman court rules changed over time to account for broader shifts in the structure of Roman state power. The last part of the Companion considers the afterlife of Roman law, raising some questions about the text’s audience. These sorts of introductory reference works are often meant for nonspecialists who are either just encountering a discipline as undergraduates or who are engaging with it in the service of other projects. While these chapters are thought-provoking and diverting—I particularly enjoyed R. H. Helmholz’s introduction to Canon Law—they appear to be aimed at...