Les juristes romains comme écrivains. Perspectives de recherche sur la pensée juridique à travers l’écriture

Abstract

If it is true that legal thought is expressed in texts, those texts that best represent the legal thought of the Romans may well be the writings of the Roman jurists. Those texts offer the modern reader the opportunity to understand the point of view of the jurists themselves, a perspective that unites social facts with legal norms. That is because those texts do not just enunciate abstract rules, rather they (very often) also demonstrate how the law is to be applied to the facts. For this reason, it may prove to be especially useful for the study of Roman legal thought to focus on the writings of the jurists. The methodological consequence of this view is that these texts must be considered comprehensively, and that means that we should also consider them as literature. Roman jurists are writers : in their work the legal is not separable from the literary. In other words, we must focus both on the technical content of these texts as well as on the fact that this content has been transmitted to us in the form of texts. A further consequence is that, at the same time that we approach these texts with the usual methods of legal history, we may also find it useful to apply to the writings of the Roman jurists the same methodology literary scholars are accustomed to use when they approach works of Latin literature.

Keywords

• Roman legal thought
• jurists as writers
• law and literature
• critical editions
• declamations and law