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The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories

The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories

The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories

Author: Zachary Herz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781009629959
Published In: September 2025
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

List Price: RMB 1,029.60

RMB 998.71 Save RMB 30.89 (3%)

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Why is Roman law so boring? In this book, Zachary Herz argues that the bureaucratic, positivistic world of Roman law is not a distraction from the violent autocracy of the Roman empire, but an imagined escape. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and even emperors used legal writing to think about worlds that were safer or fairer than the one in which they lived. This archive of political imagination slowly became a law-code, and now guides readers through a legal system about which its authors could only dream.

From Augustus to Justinian, this book shows how law symbolized order in chaotic times, and how that symbol eventually took on a life of its own. From the enlightened judgements of Hadrian to the great jurists and child rulers of Severan Rome, Herz reveals what Romans were really talking about when they talked about law.

Figures

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: did Romans have law? Part I. Nevertheless, we Live According to the Laws:

1. Augustus and the birth of imperial legality

2. The emperors who obeyed the law: Vespasian, Titus, Trajan

3. Letters from a god: Hadrian and the rescript system

Part II. Law without Order:

4. Inheritance, authority, and Alexander

5. Juristic reasoning, citational practices, and law at the end of an empire

Part III. New Rules:

6. Towards late antique legalities

7. The embodiment of the civil law

Conclusion: what we talk about when we talk about Roman law

Appendix 1. Juristic citations of imperial lawmaking in the digest

Appendix 2. Precedential reasoning in the codex Justinianus

Appendix 3. Rule-Consequentialist reasoning in the digest

Bibliography

Index of terms

Index of sources

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