Law and Empire in the Roman World

Despite the importance of law as an aspect of Roman imperialism, relatively little scholarship has focused on Rome’s juridical export to the provinces, and less still on how provincial women engaged with systems of law and empire. In this paper, I demonstrate that provincial women used Roman law to protect their interests and, in so doing, participated actively in the process of legal and cultural exchange between Rome and the provinces.

An edict of Titus Pactumeius Magnus, prefect in 176/177, survives in one ‘careless and illiterate’ copy on the back of a petition submitted 40 years after the edict was issued.¹ The edict alters the judicial process at the prefect’s assize, the conventus.

This paper argues that Augustus’ judiciary reforms of 17 BC were effected with a single lex Iulia iudiciorum, not with the two separate laws known in modern scholarship as the leges Iuliae iudiciorum publicorum et privatorum. The debate on the number of judiciary laws is ancient and modern scholarship has continued to argue over whether the princeps regulated the Roman court system with one, two, or even three laws.

This paper argues that the much-debated extract on divination from Bk. 7 of Ulpian’s De officio proconsulis (ca. 212-217 CE) in the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum is authentic through a detailed philological and historical comparison with P.Coll.Youtie I 30 (199 CE), a papyrus which preserves an edict of Quintus Aemilius Saturninus, the Prefect of Egypt, in which he bans certain forms of divination.

This paper analyzes what the actions taken to re-establish an administrative structure in Sicily in 131bc following the First Servile War indicate about prevailing opinions regarding provincial organization, systems of private law, and the relation between imperium and territory. The lex Rupilia, which details conditions for the determination of legal procedure based on the citizenship of the parties involved, appears at several places in In Verrem 2.2, but has received very little scholarly attention.