7a - High classical law

Summary

The age of the Antonines and Severans witnessed the highest achievements of Roman law, building on the foundations laid down in the last decades of the republic and the first of the empire. The law of this period, transmitted through the texts collected under the emperor Justinian, formed the doctrinal bedrock on which most modern legal systems are based; and even in those countries whose legal systems have remained formally untouched by Roman law, primarily those of the English-speaking world, the writings of the lawyers from the second half of the second century and the first quarter of the third are still cited in courts.

At the heart of this high classical law were two elements: first the jurists, and second the scientific approach to legal thought which they embodied.

Jurists, in the sense of a group of men who claimed to have specialized legal knowledge and to be particularly skilled in its deployment, can be traced back to the last century of the republic, to such men as Q. Mucius Scaevola and Ser. Sulpicius Rufus. Already in the first century they had been involved in aspects of imperial administration, but it was only from the middle of the second that they were fully integrated into it. They constituted a new type of lawyer–bureaucrat, the legal expert more or less continuously holding imperial office. One of the earliest of these, L. Volusius Maecianus, was at various times praefectus fabrum, adiutor operum publicorum, praefectus vehiculorum, pontifex minor, procurator bibliothecarum, praefectus annonae, and finally praefectus Aegypti in 161. As praefectus praetorio we find Tarruntenus Paternus and the three greatest of the Severan jurists, Aemilius Papinianus, Julius Paulus and Domitius Ulpianus; as praefectus vigilum Q. Cervidius Scaevola and Herennius Modestinus; and so on.3