The Introduction gives a brief account of Bartolus’s life, explains the world of medieval law in which he worked, and then explains the political context of the northern and central Italian city republics for which he worked, and whose problems he sought to analyse. It explains that tyranny was Bartolus’s main preoccupation, even in the two treatises ostensibly concerned with other questions. It then presents the main arguments of his three political treatises and Bartolus’s main political theory in his academic legal commentaries, and describes the later influence of these treatises in European political theory. The Introduction also argues that Bartolus conceived of these three treatises as one composite treatment of tyranny.

This chapter discusses an oft-cited source of the All-Affected Principle in a procedural maxim of Roman private law known by the tag quod omnes tangit (‘what touches all’), a maxim that became a more expansive principle of medieval canon and civil law. By exploring some of the maxim’s original contexts and formulations, the chapter draws out several important lessons for the All-Affected Principle itself: the interplay between procedural and substantive claims; the empowerment of some to advance such claims on behalf of others; and the need for procedural closure. It then explores the possible application of this approach in the context of how climate change touches all and how claims might be made on the basis of the All-Affected Principle accordingly. Identification of moral rights to a fair per capita share of a global carbon budget, and rights against the unjust imposition of harm or the risk of harm, are both considered as potential sources of such claims. A range of possible institutional arrangements to advance and realize such claims, such as trusteeship, are briefly considered in conclusion.

Chapter 4 is the first of three chapters laying a basic foundation in German law and politics. The chapter focuses on German legal history, including a deep history dating from the Roman encounters with the German barbarians up to the codification movement in the nineteenth century. The deep history shows how Germanic customary law, Roman Law, and Canon Law mixed to form modern German law. The chapter then shows how the process of development proceeded differently for private law (leading to the great codification of private law) and public law (with a tumultuous process of constitutionalization).

Chapter 2 presents the Civil Law tradition, which has been a predominant influence in the German legal culture. Grosswald Curran’s excerpt juxtaposes the Civil Law’s enlightenment characteristics with the Common Law’s romantic characteristics. The systematic, coherent, codified qualities of the Civil Law fuel the ambition for a scientifically objective legal framework. This, in turn, leads to a smaller role for judges and a larger role for legal scholars.

This chapter explains that the reasonable person was not the first anthropomorphised legal standard. The idea of model characters can be traced back to the oldest documents of humanity. The chapter introduces three of these ancient ancestors of the reasonable person: the silent person of Egypt (geru maa), the earnest person of Greece (ho spoudaios), and the male head of a family in ancient Rome (paterfamilias). There are many other ancestors of the reasonable person, and at least implicit anthropomorphised standards of behaviour could probably be found in any society at any time. The three concepts here are presented only as examples, and because they form part of one Mediterranean context in which the ancient Egyptians probably influenced the ancient Greeks, who in turn influenced the Romans, whose influence on contemporary European law and on the systems derived from it can still be felt. Each of the three figures introduced in this chapter deserves its own biography and the analysis offered here remains fragmented. Nonetheless, the selected aspects of the lives of the geru maa, of the spoudaios, and of paterfamilias foreshadow many of the questions, tensions, and challenges with which the common law’s reasonable person still struggles today.

This chapter develops along three lines. First, following a historical approach, it describes the birth and development of the civil law tradition – from the rediscovery of Roman law in the High Middle Ages to the enactment of the German Civil Code. The second part presents two cases where the civil law model has been transplanted outside of Europe: Latin America and Japan. The final part offers a critical outlook on what the civil law tradition means today.

Roman law persists after the fall of Rome, not only governing private/business-relations, but also as the basis for the Western European legal order. When it comes down to the law the Roman Empire lived on as a virtual empire (of the imagination) more than a millennium after the actual fall of the physical empire in the West. Roman law was studied, codified and used as if the Empire was still there.

The Chinese Civil Code, approved on 28 May 2021, is an important code for several reasons: it is a synthesis of the Roman legal system, a privileged place collecting institutions and dogmatic systems through categories, institutes and principles that provides a careful and balanced synthesis of the matter it regulates. Besides the well-known and peculiar concepts of the civil law system encompassed by the Chinese Civil Code, socialism with Chinese characteristics and custom as source of law in the absence of statutory provisions set the Code between past and future with its own identity and the ability to adapt to the continuous and future changes of the surrounding reality. The only certainty in this continuous evolution of the surrounding reality, is that the Code belongs and is open to the system in a process of continuous and mutual enhancement and complementarity. The typical and distinctive patterns of Roman tradition are endorsed and combined with Chinese legal tradition for their interpretative value, both individually and in the context of the Code as a whole, to give certainty and solidity to a regulatory system meant to last over time.

The first chapter examines the reasons that the led nineteenth-century liberal jurists who sought to modernize property to turn to Roman antiquity for inspiration. In Roman law, jurists found a powerful idea of legal scientific method, a professional role model, a large inventory of ostensibly apolitical doctrines produced by jurists of a distant and revered age.

The Introduction lays out the context, the motives, and the main features of the reinvention of Roman property in nineteenth-century Europe. It introduces the global professional network of elite liberal jurists who embarked in this ambitious project and explores the reasons of their attraction to Roman propert and their committment to changing ideas of modernization. Further the introduction examines the conceptual structre of modern dominium.

Some Greek texts contain words in Latin script and/or with Latin endings. Latin script occurs mainly in Roman law texts; these are investigated with particular attention to Theophilus Antecessor and the Scholia Sinaitica. Evidence for script mixture within individual words is considered. Words in Latin script and/or with Latin endings are more likely to be codeswitches than loanwords, but some loanwords appear with one or both these features. Multi-word phrases retain their original script and inflections much more often than individual words; these are mostly codeswitches, but some phrases may be loanwords.

Modern legal systems generally have a category of obligations known variously as restitution, unjust enrichment, unjustified enrichment or some variant of these. Whichever legal system they are found in, they have a common source in Roman law: the stoic idea that enrichment at the expense of another is unjust, obligations quasi ex contractu and the different forms of non-contractual condictiones. This chapter traces the development of the ideas from Justinian to the modern day, picking up ideas of equity along the way. It focuses on the shifting principles underlying the category, typified by its name, rather than its concrete instantiations, aiming to trace the largely unthinking patterns of borrowing from one legal system to another and from one language to another.

This chapter, stimulated by Professor Bell’s contribution to legal education (as well as to comparative law and legal reasoning), tackles the question of whether traditional doctrinal law has anything to offer, intellectually, to disciplines outside law. That is to say, does law export knowledge to other disciplines or does it just import knowledge? Despite John Bell’s positive agenda asserted some eighteen or so years ago, this examination presents a gloomy picture. This is not to argue that law faculties are making no contributions to the Academy in general – indeed, the opposite is true. But such contributions are largely founded on knowledge imported into law faculties. Comparative lawyers, or some of them such as Professor Bell, offer some hope.

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.