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8 - Persons, Things and Nature in Roman Law

Reflections on Legal History

from Part II - Recollection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2023

By
Arnaud Paturet
Edited by
Sandy Lamalle  and
Peter Stoett
Sandy Lamalle
Affiliation:
Concordia University, Montréal
Peter Stoett
Affiliation:
Ontario Tech University
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Summary

Roman law is often considered as an intellectual matrix of contemporary laws and in particular French civil law. However, even if the vocabulary persisted, some legal concepts went through great changes across history as law was step by step related to a subject’s power. The notion of ‘thing’ originally meant the trial, the case, the litigious situation managed by the legal process. In this way, the thing was understood as a res iuris. In contemporary law systems, the thing (res as a legal category) ordinarily specifies some goods on which the subject applies his property power. This view is understandable considering the evolution due to the theorisation of subjective law which led to the promotion of a strong and exclusive separation between persons and things, while Roman law could imbricate these legal categories. This difficulty is at the heart of the problem when jurists aim to categorise Nature in legal taxonomy.

Keywords

Naturelegal historylegal philosophyrespersonaDigest of JustinianRoman lawius naturalelegal categorisationsubject–object dichotomy
Type
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Representations and Rights of the Environment , pp. 184 - 205
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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