An Introduction to Roman Law (Clarendon Law Series)

Roman private law developed through centuries of decisions about property, inheritance, obligations and disputes between people. Barry Nicholas begins with the Twelve Tables and moves through later Roman legal traditions, explaining the institutions and concepts that jurists used to make sense of those disputes.

Legal procedure matters here as much as the rules themselves: Nicholas shows how Roman lawyers reasoned about the law in practice. This edition adds material by Ernest Metzger, along with a revised bibliography and a glossary of Latin terms. The categories Roman jurists developed continued to shape legal thinking long after the world in which they worked had changed.