Evolution of Roman Law

Running Head : THE EVOLUTION OF ROMAN LAW

The Evolution of Roman Law

[The Writer 's Name]

[The Name of the Institution] The Evolution of Roman Law

Introduction

According to tradition Rome was founded in 753 B .C . In the twenty-seven centuries since then Roman law has lived two lives and makes two claims on our attention . In its first life it was the law of the city of Rome and , in its ultimate maturity , of the whole Roman Empire . But it was more than this . It was the most original product

of the Roman mind . In almost all their other intellectual endeavors the Romans were the eager pupils of the Greeks , but in law they were , and knew themselves to be the masters . In their hands law became for the first time a thoroughly scientific subject , an elaborately articulated system of principles abstracted from the detailed rules which constitute the raw material of law . This process of abstraction is important not merely for the simplicity of formulation which it makes possible , but also because principles , unlike rules , are fertile : a lawyer can by combining two or more principles create new principles and therefore new rules

The difference between a system of principles and a system of rules may thus be likened to the difference between an alphabetic script and a system of ideographs such as the Chinese . It was the strength of the Roman lawyers that they not only had the ability to construct and manipulate these abstractions on a scale and with a complexity previously unknown , but had also a clear sense of the needs of social and commercial life , an eye for the simplest method of achieving a desired practical result , and a readiness to reject the logic of their own constructions when it conflicted with the demands of convenience . If the law is 'practical reason ' it is not surprising that the Romans , with their genius for the practical , should have found in it a field of intellectual activity to which they were ideally suited

This first life of Roman law was summed up , and in the event brought to a close , by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century A .D . It claims our attention for the intrinsic quality of its intellectual achievement But five and a half centuries later the law books of Justinian came to be studied in northern Italy , and there began , at first in the universities and later in the courts , the astonishing second life of Roman law which gave to almost the whole of Europe a common stock of legal ideas , a common grammar of legal thought , and , to a varying but considerable extent , a common mass of legal rules (Jolowicz , 1972 England stood out against this Reception of Roman law and retained its own Common law largely but not entirely uninfluenced by the Roman . Hence it is that in the world today there are two great families of law of European origin - the one deriving from the Common law of England...