In the study of any system of law, there is a certain amount of background material which is often assumed in legal writing, but which is essential in order to understand that writing fully.

Included here are matters such as: who makes the law? Who is responsible for interpreting and enforcing it? How is the law to be found? These are the kinds of thing that, in an undergraduate law degree, are typically covered in an introductory course called Legal Systems, or something similar.

The need for this kind of background material is particularly great when studying a historical legal system, such as Roman law. When modern law is under consideration, a reasonably educated non-lawyer can be assumed to have at least some outline understanding of how Parliament works or how the courts work, and of the different roles of such groups as lawyers and the police. When studying the law of a past society, this outline understanding cannot be assumed. Roman society was, in many ways, profoundly different from our own. The purpose of this first part of the book is to provide this context to the study of Roman law.

First, Chapter 1 provides an overview of Roman history, from the beginnings of the city of Rome up to the end of the Roman Empire. A particular focus here is the governance of Rome, and how this changed over time.

Next, in Chapter 2 we look at the legal process. We will see here how litigation worked in Roman law. Of particular interest here is the role of the public official with the title of urban praetor, who was responsible for civil justice.

In Chapter 3, we will see how Roman law developed, from earliest times through to the sixth-century emperor Justinian's compilation of legal materials known as the Corpus luris Civilis, or ‘Body of the Civil Law', from which we derive most of our knowledge of Roman law.

Although this book has been written with students of Scots law particularly in mind, we will not see much of Scotland in these first three chapters. We will see more of Scotland in Chapter 4, which considers the influence of Roman law on later law, up to the modern day.

There is one final point to note. Throughout this book, there is extensive reference to Roman legal literature. It is likely that most readers of this book will not, at the outset, be familiar with standard referencing styles for these texts. However, if much headway is to be made with the study of Roman law, it is essential to be familiar with these. Accordingly, readers are referred to Appendix 1 at the end of this book, where there is a list of all Roman texts referred to in this book, together with guidance on how they are to be found and cited.