For centuries the academic study of Roman law has centred, with some notable exceptions, on the courts in the city of Rome itself, and especially on the jurisdiction of the urban praetor.

Given the richness of the sources preserved in the Digest and the Institutes of Gaius and Justinian and their importance for the development of subsequent legal scholarship and systems, that is scarcely surprising.

But in the historical context of the Roman Republic and Empire it is misleading. From the second century BC onwards Roman military power and Roman admin­istrative control came to dominate the Mediterranean basin, eventually encompassing north-western Europe, the lands on the southern bank of the Danube, Egypt, and the modern Middle East. With this power and control came the necessity of making legal decisions, demanded not least by the local inhabitants of the areas subject to that control, who recognized the value of judgments which carried the weight of Rome’s military dominance. The context within which such cases were decided was not, juridically speaking, Roman, and the cases themselves might not involve Roman citizens at all, but those to whom it fell to oversee them belonged to the class from which the urban praetors were drawn, and in some cases had themselves held that office earlier in their careers. It was inevitable that when they needed structures and patterns to manage their own jurisdiction they turned to those of the ius civile, even though the parties to the cases were not Roman citizens. It is the interplay of Roman procedure and local, non­Roman legal rights and individuals which gives the legal work of provincial governors its particular flavour and interest, especially in the earlier centuries.

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