10534 - Principles of Roman Law

The course aims to provide students with a basic knowledge of Roman law and private process. The teaching, while employing technical-legal language and concepts, is historically oriented, because it intends to promote awareness of the historicity of law as an intellectual and social phenomenon.
As for its subject matter, the course will focus - once the sources of the production of law have been historically examined - on the main institutions of the Roman legal order, in its substantive (persons and family, legal acts, real rights, obligations, donation, succession by cause of death) and procedural aspects. As for the method, the Roman legal experience will be examined, focusing on two of its main characteristics: the fact that the application of the law was mediated by the scientific reflection of jurisprudence and the coexistence of a plurality of normative layers.
The first characteristic makes it necessary to pay particular attention to the way Roman jurists represented the law, attention that, through comparison, also helps to better understand current legal categories. The second characteristic leads one to recognise the centrality of the process, in which the various layers of law (primarily ius civile and ius honorarium) were reduced to unity. To this end, in concrete teaching, the student will be confronted with the fundamental institutes of law through the study of private trial and actions.