The "Case-Law" Approach
In this Casebook, students are exposed to the working methods of the Roman jurists, to their internal controversies, and to the principles and values that underlay their law.
One important area, family law, has been chosen to illustrate these points. The basic framework of Roman family law derives from two sources: statutes (legislation in various forms) and the Edict of the urban praetor. Some Cases involve juristic interpretation of these fundamental sources. But in most Cases the jurists range well beyond the basic framework into broader legal issues associated with the life of the family; and most of Roman family law is in fact the jurists' own creation, not the result of straightforward statutory or edictal interpretation.At our respective universities, we use this Casebook as the basic text for a semester-long undergraduate course in Roman law. The course is organized around classroom discussion of the individual Cases—usually about four to six Cases each hour. By delving into the Cases, students develop their own ability to examine legal rules and to assess them critically. Over a semester, the improvement in their legal skills is usually remarkable. Further, all law is to a large extent a seamless cloth, and this is no less true of Roman law; so students soon pick up a good deal of Roman law in areas besides family law, as well as some of the rules in their own legal system.
class=a3 style='text-indent:18.0pt'>In order to encourage a deeper understanding of the Cases, we require students to purchase a general handbook on Roman law (e.g., Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law, 1962). We also recommend that they purchase Edward Levi's An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (1949) or some comparable book introducing the process of legal reasoning. Students who not only participate in classroom discussion but also read these assigned books come away from the course with a good grasp of the nature of legal thinking in general, as well as an appreciation of the general content of both Roman and modern family law.This Casebook is modeled after the format of Herbert Hausmaninger's highly successful German casebooks on Roman contract and property law, as well as Bruce Friers Casebook on the Roman Law of Delict (1989). To our mind, this format offers the best available method to communicate to modern students the content and character of classical Roman law. Direct exposure to original sources is far more intellectually stimulating than lectures or a superficial reading of modern synthetic accounts; students also learn much more about law from the original sources than they could possibly learn from a mere summary. We believe that students are best advised to avoid the crabbed formalism of elementary works such as the Institutes of Gaius or of Justinian and instead to plunge as soon as possible into the actual working texts of the jurists.