Category: Ancient law

For anyone working on the lex Aquilia, the following text will be well familiar:

D. 9, 2, 5, 3 Ulp. 18 ad ed.
Si magister in disciplina vulneraverit servum vel occiderit, an Aquilia teneatur, quasi damnum iniuria dederit? et Iulianus scribit Aquilia teneri eum, qui eluscaverat discipulum in disciplina: multo magis igitur in occiso idem erit dicendum. proponitur autem apud eum species talis: sutor, inquit, puero discenti ingenuo filio familias, parum bene facienti quod demonstraverit, forma calcei cervicem percussit, ut oculus puero perfunderetur. dicit igitur Iulianus iniuriarum quidem actionem non competere, quia non faciendae iniuriae causa percusserit, sed monendi et docendi causa: an ex locato, dubitat, quia levis dumtaxat castigatio concessa est docenti: sed lege Aquilia posse agi non dubito:

It recounts the grisly tale of a teacher knocking out the eye of a lazy pupil and the jurist, Julian, discussing the matter whether this counts as wrongful damage to property (the text contains two scenarios, a slave pupil and a freeborn one).
For all the theoretical complexity of this text, it should of course not be forgotten that the example was rooted in the Roman experience where teachers did strike students “monendi et docendi causa”.
A good example of this can be seen from the following grave marker for a teacher (below) located in the archaeological museum in Milan. The grave is notable for two reasons, first, the teacher was a freedwoman and secondly, at the bottom, there is clearly a depiction of a teacher striking an idle pupil with a strap of some sort. While this blogger of course does not condone this type of activity, it does show that the examples from the Digest should be read in context. They are, after all, Roman examples.

This conference notice has just been posted on the classicists list:

International Conference

KU Leuven, 29 June – 1 July 2016

Family squabbles, fights over real estate, disputes over money transactions and assault cases were no less complex to resolve in Antiquity than they are in the modern world. The unique evidence from Egypt (more than 59,000 papyri and 44,000 ostraca) shows a wide variety of mechanisms that could be used to settle interpersonal disputes and to maintain social order within the country. Most of the evidence comes from petitions, official correspondence and reports of court proceedings, which have been the subject of renewed attention in recent years and which give us primarily insight into the day-to-day operation of the legal system and the experiences of the people involved with it. Despite this wealth of information, papyri only offer us snapshots of the disputing process: though some documents record previous decisions made by officials or previous actions taken by victims, the outcome of a dispute is seldom known. This raises several questions concerning the prevailing legal procedures, the length of time that passed before a ‘final’ decision was reached, the government’s ability to enforce legal decisions, and the subversive ways in which the legal system could be used.
According to sociologists, however, the legal system represents only one side of the coin: attempts could also be made to settle disputes privately, with no involvement of officials, for instance by coercion, negotiation and mediation. These private processes of dispute resolution, which are also referred to as ‘self-help’ or ‘personal justice’, are more difficult to discern, because they are not systematically documented in juristic papyri, which constitute the majority of the evidence from Egypt. Documents such as petitions, private correspondence, oracle questions and curse tablets nevertheless offer a rich data set for studying – at least partially – disputing processes that took place ‘in the shadow of the law’ and the institutions that underpinned and strengthened these processes (such as social norms, religion, family values, …).

The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars working on dispute resolution from different angles (petitioning, law, law enforcement, social norms, religion, …) and different fields (papyrology, legal history, sociology, linguistics, …) in order to study the phenomenon of ‘social control’ in Egypt, defined here as all those resources available by which the government attempted to maintain law and order and by which people attempted to resolve conflicts and to assure the norm-conforming behaviour of others, with a particular focus on the transformation of the disputing process between the age of the Ptolemies and the Theodosians. We welcome both papers on dispute resolution in general and papers discussing specific documents, cases or stages of the disputing process.

The keynote lectures will be given by Prof. Dr. Benjamin Kelly (York University), Prof. Dr. Joe G. Manning (Yale University), Prof. Dr. Bernhard Palme (Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altertumskunde, Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Universität Wien) and Prof. Dr. Anne-Emmanuelle Veïsse (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Proposals for papers (30 minutes in length) or posters (size A0) in English, French and German are invited on the following topics:

Methodological issues concerning papyri and other documents as evidence for dispute resolution
Mechanisms of dispute resolution (litigation, arbitration, negotiation, coercion, mediation, …)
Social institutions (social norms, village life, …) and their role in preventing and regulating conflicts
Dispute-related types of documents (petitions, oaths, oracle questions, …)
Officials or other authorities involved in dispute resolution (judges, lawyers, law enforcement officials, priests, estate managers, …)
Social interactions between people and officials
Government policy towards dispute resolution
Importance of individual responsibility of victims for obtaining justice
Importance of socio-economic status of victims for obtaining justice
Effectiveness of disputing processes in ensuring social order
Impact of factors such as war, abuse and corruption on disputing processes
Impact of Ptolemaic/Roman rule on disputing processes
…

Abstracts (max. 200 words) can be submitted electronically through the submission form for papers and posters at the conference’s website (http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/oudegeschiedenis/DREgypt2016) until February 15, 2016. Notification of acceptance will be given by the end of February 2016.

For further information, please contact Sofie.Waebens@kuleuven.be.

Organisers: Prof. Dr. Katelijn Vandorpe (KU Leuven) and Dr. Sofie Waebens (KU Leuven)
Scientific committee: Prof. Dr. Alain Delattre (Université libre de Bruxelles); Prof. Dr. Paul Erdkamp (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); Prof. Dr. Joe G. Manning (Yale University); Prof. Dr. Jakub Urbanik (University of Warsaw); Prof. Dr. Anne-Emmanuelle Veïsse (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne); Em. Prof. Dr. Willy Clarysse (KU Leuven); Prof. Dr. Katelijn Vandorpe (KU Leuven); Dr. Sofie Waebens (KU Leuven)

Our blogger has been alerted to the publication of this important new work in the field of Law and Economics in the Ancient World by Dennis Kehoe et al. Details here:

http://www.press.umich.edu/7405925/law_and_transaction_costs_in_the_ancient_economy?utm_source=UMP&utm_campaign=574e6fa446-Kehoe_Law_and_Transaction&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_19d3ad4079-574e6fa446-203437313 

Readers of various UK newspapers may have seen this recent article. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/13/woman-gives-birth-in-addison-lee-taxi-cleaning-bill_n_8553646.html

A woman, who had summoned a taxi to take her to the hospital, gave birth to a baby in the back of a taxi. The driver demanded that she pay a “fouling charge” of £100.

This is an interesting notion and one wonders whether it lurks somewhere in the general conditions of carriage that no one ever reads. Judging from the eventual outcome, one suspects not.

Of course, the Romans dealt with a related issue:

D. 19, 2, 19, 7 Ulp. 32 ad ed.
Si quis mulierem vehendam navi conduxisset, deinde in nave infans natus fuisset, probandum est pro infante nihil deberi, cum neque vectura eius magna sit neque his omnibus utatur, quae ad navigantium usum parantur.

Ulpian is here more concerned with more passage money is owed for the infant, since it is no real drain on the resources prepared for the expected passengers.

One wonders what Ulpian would have made of this.