Thank you Mitra! I’ll be drinking to it in Detroit…

Check’s in the mail 🫡

Reading Roman law in this way doesn’t just make sense of its nonsensical features, but also reveals the humanity and affective texture of, let’s be honest, some of the most boring texts in the Latin corpus. I hope you enjoy the book, and let me know if you have questions about it! (fin)

Later Roman rulers looked to Classical law to understand how the state should be run, and post-imperial Europe took ‘Roman law’ as an inspiration for their own legalizing projects. We can understand Roman legal writing, then, as a dream of order that eventually came true. (6/)

Different actors told different stories for different reasons, but all of them were trying to stay alive and get what they wanted in a world that made those things hard. What is special about legal stories, though, is what later readers did with them. (5/)

We can see petitioners, bureaucrats, scholars, and emperors as misdescribing their world, but I think it’s more useful to imagine them as telling stories about their world: imagining their state as something more predictable, rational, and fair. (4/)

I argue that Roman law functions more like a sophisticated ideal theory than a set of rules—our archives record different subjects, with different relationships to Roman power, using ‘law talk’ to try and imagine that power in terms they found simpatico. (3/)

Basically, the book is trying to figure out why Roman law looks so little like Roman life. Most imperial historians know that ‘law on the ground’ has an awkward relationship to codified law in the period—the question is, if Roman law isn’t governing outcomes what is it doing instead? (2/)

(Also, hi to all of my new followers! I know you think this is an ancient legal history account, and you’re not wrong, but seriously I am worried for our divas.)

I really want someone to photoshop a yarmulke onto Farfetch’d

You’re welcome, Schmaltzy

High Holeekdays