The Judgment of the Provinces: The Roman Empire and the Origins of Law and Society

Roman law is justly famous, but what was its relationship to governing an empire? In this book, Ari Z. Bryen argues that law, as the learned practice that we know today, emerged from the challenge of governing a diverse and fractious set of imperial subjects. Through analysis of these subjects' political and legal ideologies, Bryen reveals how law became the central topic of political contest in the Roman Empire. Law offered a means of testing legitimacy and evaluating government, as well as a language for asking fundamental political questions. But these political claims did not go unchallenged. Elites resisted them, and jurists, in collaboration with emperors, reimagined law as a system that excluded the voices of the governed. The result was to separate, for the first time, 'law' from 'society' more broadly, and to define law as a primarily literate and learned practice, rather than the stuff of everyday life.

• Brings together fresh and wide-ranging evidence, across different media and languages, to account for the full experience of Roman governance
• Shows readers how elite and non-elite perspectives interacted and challenged one another, and how those debates impacted governance
• Provides a genealogy of the law/society distinction, arguing that it emerged as a response to governing a diverse empire