Roman Law

There are many reasons why Roman law probably shouldn’t be included in a study tracing the origin of rights. Roman law, first of all, was the law of an ancient slaveholding civilization, built on a ruthless legacy of war and conquest. As any student of Roman law will know, slavery was interwoven into the fabric of Roman law, making it impossible to understand fully how the Roman legal system operated without recognizing the everyday legal reality of Roman slavery. Practically every aspect of Roman law depended on whether those subject to it were legally free or slave. Given this illiberal legacy of slavery and the basic inequality of status encoded into Roman law, it’s difficult to see how Roman law could plausibly serve as a model for theorizing rights.