NEW COURSE IN CLASSICS!
CLAS309F / 688F: Roman Civil Law
Prof. Gregory Bucher, Fall 2017, MWF 9:00-9:50
What is your status in your
community? Who are you eligible to
marry, and who should have custody of the children if you divorce? How do you go about making or challenging a
will? Fundamental questions such as
these are of importance to all complex societies. In this course, we focus on the answers the
Romans gave.
Using a case-study approach to
Roman family law, we discover a large subset of the “underlying assumptions” of
Roman society: no one can claim to understand Roman society without a grasp of
Roman law. The focus on family law limits the scope so that we can discover,
discuss, and argue about a reasonably self-contained body of case law. Our
interlocked set of cases which increase in complexity requires us to draw more
and more upon the basic concepts we develop in the earlier ones. We study the
nature of rules and their interpretation, precedent and reasoning by analogy,
sources of law and authorities, and other principles of legal reasoning.
These skills and ways of thinking
are as applicable to US law as to the Roman, and are recommended for pre-law
students. A natural focus on the evolution of family law over time makes of our
cases a laboratory for studying the forceful interplay of pre-legal tradition,
the realities of the world law must confront (such as demographics), and ideas
of social justice. At its best, this class should train you in traditional ways
of thinking about the law while simultaneously leaving you astonished at
examples of Roman laws that see the world in a fundamentally different way from
ourselves.
All readings in English.
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