Law Commons^™

Tradition, Precedent, And Power In Roman Egypt, Ari Bryen

Studio for Law and Culture

This paper is one of a series of preliminary studies that I hope will eventually end in a book-length study of the history of law in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The history of law in the provinces tends to be written in one of two ways: either as the story of how Roman rules and concepts interpenetrate local cultural and legal systems (the history of the many and varied “vulgarizations” of Roman law); or, in the wake of the “Mediterraneanist” paradigms of the twentieth century, as a story of how local communities seek to regulate themselves – …