The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted
through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government.
Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates in "Law, Language, and Empire in
the Roman Tradition," the civil law was also an instrument of
empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in
response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was
deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures
far afield.Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome
grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial
conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools--most prominently
analogy and fiction--used to extend the system and enable it to
regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original
legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of
language came to occupy in Roman legal thought.In the second part
of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public,
and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and
international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided
conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition.
Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of
domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to
its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the
institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively
ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law
supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings
transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by
Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome,
henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.
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