As we have seen, the legal structure of Roman marriage was fragile, in the sense that it was far from creating the family as a real partnership with respect to property; the wife appears, at times, almost as an intruder within a household structure still centered on the paterfamilias.
In practice, it seems, the jurists relied on the institution of dowry to provide this delicate union with a degree of stability As we have also seen (Cases 29-36), creating the dowry was a customary part of the marriage process at Rome, even though it was not required for marriage.
With the decline of manus marriage (Cases 37-40), the importance of dowry greatly increased, not only because providing for the wife was considerably more problematic in “free” marriage, but also because the inevitable reluctance of the husband to surrender the dowry became a prime deterrent to his precipitate ending of their marriage.To be sure, it was not a legal presumption that Roman marriages were lacking in love or at least in affection—quite the contrary (see Cases 43-45). But the real issue is whether, when inevitable conflicts arose between the spouses, the marital regime of Roman law tended indirectly to exacerbate these conflicts and thus to prove counterproductive, at any rate if one long-term goal of marriage law was to encourage stable unions. So, in approaching dowry law, you should ask, above all, whether the Roman rules were fair to all parties and gave sufficiently clear guidance, so that the day-to-day management of dowries was unlikely to occasion quarrels between husband and wife or to inflame their preexisting quarrels. Did legal rules adequately protect the interests of the wife, both during the marriage and when it eventually ended?
Other issues are also important. Dowry places substantial property in the hands of one party, who holds it (or at least part of it) for the benefit of another, in what we tend to think of as a trust relationship (although the Romans avoid this line of analysis). In such situations, one major problem centers on the management of the property: is the holder required, or at least encouraged, to invest and develop the property, or is he allowed to let it deteriorate? How are incentives to proper behavior built into the structure of the dowry institution? Much here depends on the extent to which the husbands expenditure on the property can be reclaimed. To what extent is he encouraged to manage the property prudently, not only in his own interests but in those of his wife?
More broadly still, you should think about whether the Roman jurists may have expected too much from dowry as an institution. Was dowry, even when operating in its ideal form, likely to provide Roman marriage with adequate stability? Did the jurists do everything they could to develop this controversial institution in a rational way? How might it have been improved?