There is, of course, no right way to teach Roman law. The subject has appeal over a wide range of potential interests, particularly if authors like Cicero or subjects like criminal law are brought into the mix. But the truth is that Roman law itself – above all, the law of the Roman jurists, as represented principally in Justinian’s Digest – should have some claim to centrality in an undergraduate course, both because of its overwhelming historical consequences and because it is a subject that is likely to be uniquely useful to undergraduates who are giving any thought whatsoever to law as a career.
At any rate, this has always been my approach to teaching Roman law. There are a number of justifications for this approach, but the chief one is this: Our educational system is organized so as to largely avoid introducing students to legal methods and modes of thinking until the day they arrive in law school. There are justifications for such a firewall; above all, law teachers dislike having to undo non-professional preconceptions and prejudices about the law. Thus, while undergraduate courses on basic economics and on American history — even American constitutional history — are virtually prerequisites for law school, courses on American constitutional law or on law and economics are generally frowned upon in law admissions offices. (Business law courses are considered beneath contempt.)
But legal thinking is of central importance in modern civic experience. The American compartmentalization is therefore to some extent unfortunate, since it results in a bifurcated civil discourse, with the large majority of Americans finding the higher process of law — as represented, for instance, in Supreme Court opinions — almost incomprehensible; only lawyers find themselves truly at home with this process. By contrast, in Europe legal education normally begins on an undergraduate level even though the vast majority of undergraduate law majors will not become lawyers.
Roman law seems to me one way of trying to bridge this gap, and the best way that is available to Classics departments. The law itself is of sustained interest when examined close-up, under an analytical microscope; and the cognitive mechanisms thereby developed serve to generally make legal thinking much more accessible, even for students who eventually decide against going to law school. Further, Roman law operates against a social and economic background that, despite its exotic elements (above all, slavery), is still readily comprehensible precisely because of the absence of advanced technology and capitalist institutions. The preserved juristic opinions are rarely fully argued, a feature that is (perhaps unexpectedly) a source of considerable pedagogical value when one teaches the art of distinguishing cases. Finally, Roman law is alien enough that it constitutes no threat to subsequent law school teaching.
Classicists often feel intimidated by Roman legal thinking. My final point is that there is no reason for this reaction. It is far easier to teach a classicist law than to teach a lawyer classics.