NARRATOR: Thanks for joining this episode of the No. 86 lecture series, in which Professor Richard Epstein discusses the “why to study Roman Law” - including: How Roman Law relates to Anglo-American law How to deal with linguistic and cultural differences How modern students can benefit from learning two systems vs. one This lecture is part of a series with Professor Epstein on how this ancient legal system can provide crucial insights about modern problems. Professor Epstein is one of the most prominent legal scholars of our day. He is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. As always, the Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues; all expressions of opinion are those of the speaker. PUBLIUS: Why study roman law? What relevance does it have to modern life? RICHARD EPSTEIN: It's important to understand that when you're talking about Roman law it may be an ancient system but it is not a primitive system. If you were to try to compare Roman law to Roman science, if you were trying to figure out whether or not you wanted to study the theory of evolution or the theory of reproduction or the theory of heavenly bodies using Greek and Roman science you would probably not get very far. If you start looking at the Roman text, it represented an enormous advance in systematization over every previous system of law anywhere on the face of the globe. Instead of having a series of literary texts and bits and pieces of oratorical speeches, all of a sudden you get a fully comprehended and organized system of law. If you were to ask, "What's the rate of depreciation?" That is, how much over the last 2000 years have Roman law has essentially disintegrated by pressures of time and force? The answer is in the areas in which the Romans law were their masters, the rate of depreciation is probably somewhere in the order of 10 or 15%, which means that it has phenomenal durability relative to modern systems. There are many areas where the Romans actually had a better understanding of the basic legal principles than did the modern common law. I think the explanation for this stems from one very simple fact: that common law the way the system tended to develop was through judge-made increment. Judges deal with cases that arise and cases never arise in a logical order. Roman law was not made by judges. They were relatively insignificant players in the articulation of doctrine. Roman law was made by professors like me. What they did is they managed to systematize and organize the particular field. Now just doing a systematization doesn't mean you've got it right, but the Romans, even though their theory lagged to some extent, had this absolutely impeccable instinct about what the pressure points were and what the relevant distinctions were in various areas. In many areas, for example, if you look at Roman pleading it's more sophisticated than the modern angle of American pleading, and it is so, not by the standards of Roman law, but by standards of modern philosophy and modern linguistics on how it is that language starts to organize itself. If you start looking at the Roman law in various kinds of areas, for example in its relationship to property, property held in common, property which was private, the Romans essentially had the right classification more or less for the right reason. So it is if you go through the contracts tort and restitution. It's an amazingly sophisticated system. Now people will say, "How can this be?" Well they did it to some extent by instinct and some extent by observation. It's also the case that Roman law, like every other early system of law, has a series of elements which would never survive today. Most notably the Roman law of slavery, which was highly sophisticated, which is not to say that it was morally defensible. When Justinian wrote about this in his Institutes around 532 or so A.D. what happened was, he said, quite simply, "The natural state of all man is to be free. We have an institution of slavery. I'm working for the emperor and so therefore, what you must understand under these circumstances is that a posit of law, the way things go, is in conflict with the natural law." But we have to figure out the way this posit of law developed, and then you get this incredibly sophisticated body of Roman law which, oddly enough continues to have relevance even after slavery is gone, because it starts to tell you about the nature of limited liability for corporations, about principles of agency and joint ownership and the like so that you can learn an enormous amount from a system whose fundamental moral premise everybody rejects today. So all that this kind of information, I can say with complete confidence that virtually everything I have written on any private or public law survey since I started writing in 1968 or so, has always been influenced by these Roman doctrine and I regard this as a secret weapon as a comparative advantage over other people who have never studied these laws. It's very easy to dismiss as a crank course something that you've never taken, but once you understand how the thing is put together, you will never look at the common law or American constitutional law again in exactly the same way. The basic relationships that exist between man and man, man and woman, woman and woman, and all individuals in this state have certain constants which exist across time and space. If in fact, you have a second take on these problems through the lens of a very different culture and then bring it to compare to your own, what you do is, you have two points of reference for every particular problem instead of one. If it turned out that the Roman solutions had died, this might be regarded as a rather odd enterprise, but there are two things about Roman law that one has to remember. One is that the system of law was powerful enough so that 2000 years ago essentially what it did was organize the basic structures of an empire which has never been equaled in the course of human history in terms of its influence, scope, and power. You cannot do that with respect to a legal system which is fundamentally flawed. So they must have been doing something right. Even if they, given the lack of theory in the way in which they worked, could not explain why it was that their system worked, what you can do when you teach Roman law is take some innocent looking rules and then compare them to modern legal theory about how it is that legal systems are put together and the trick here is to understand that the modern analysis of how law works tends to validate the kinds of conclusions that the Romans were able to do. It teaches you to become very careful in the way in which you start to read text. There are very few primary texts in Roman law. Essentially 98% of the relevant information is contained in three books. The first of these, which was only discovered quite by accident in 1816 is a book called Gaius' Institute, written by a man about whom we do not know his first name. It was written probably around 160-180 A.D. at the peak of the Roman empire. Gaius was something of a genius in that he had very astute philosophical inclinations about language, he had very clear powers of exposition, and he had a very strong historical sense about how things work. This is the only book which essentially tries to tell you the evolution of Roman law. You have to read it extremely closely to get as much out of it as possible because there's no other place to go. Remember words were very expensive back in those particular days so that the compression was extremely great. What students learned to do when they read Gaius is to make very large mountains out of relatively small molehills and they have to be able to do it with precision. It's the kind of technique which never leaves you. The second two books have been known forever. One is Justinian's Institute, which was prepared by Trebonia and five other authors. I think it was around 530 A.D. It's essentially starts with Gaius' Institute, which was the standard case book, and then expands it to take into account a series of developments that happened in the 400 years or so after he wrote, of which it turned out that there were many. But the basic scaffolding turns out to be there. It's important for another reason because some of the stuff from Gaius is missing because the way the book was recovered it was underneath it on a pounce, that is a piece of sheepskin and they got rid of the accounts that had been written over it and they found 90% of the text but they don't have the other 10% of the text. We have the complete text of Justinian's Institute. It's a more comprehensive book, it's extremely well-written. It was very influential during the Medieval periods and the revival of the Roman law in Bologna starting in the 11th and 12th centuries and so forth. You have to be able to read the two books in common. The great defect of Justinian's Institute is Justinian was something of a megalomaniac and he didn't want anybody to be thinking about historical evolution. He wanted everybody to look at his books and his sources as though they were the sole things available. So all the historical evolution, which is richly described in Gaius, disappears in Justinian and, indeed when people started to make speculations about how these things worked before they discovered Gaius' Institute, it was usually a series of comical errors. History has a way of being extremely odd and idiosyncratic and it's too strange to invent so you have to go back and read it. PUBLIUS: Are there any other ways in which Roman law relates to the modern world? One could say that it’s an old system of law that doesn’t give us anything to learn from today. RICHARD EPSTEIN: If you start looking at the German system and the Spanish system and the French system and so forth. Basically these are all modern variations on the Roman law system. Probably the basic relationships survive, as I said, 70 or 80 percent, which is an extraordinarily high number, and the animating principles help fill in the gaps, and the differences across these systems may exist in terminology and the code provisions that they've done. The BGB, that is the German code, the Gesetzbuch, the big book of the law. This particular book, essentially, is more detailed than the Napoleonic code, but they're not inconsistent in the way in which they work. You start looking in the Spanish positions. When I ask my Spanish friends, it's fine, but happens when I teach Roman law, you always have somebody from Belgium, Germany, Chile, or whatever it is there, and so I'm sitting there, we're talking about... they say, "Now let me tell you what the law in your country turns out to be..." have never having read the system. Well why do you do this with about 90% accuracy? Well because essentially, they're following the kind of Roman law position. So another way to put the question is, modern civil law, more or less, sophisticated the modern common law, and it's a much closer question than you would otherwise have thought. So in the way in which I like to think about is that are many legal problems that often turn around on a knife's edge, and the question is, is one system going to do better or worse on this particular issue? And in some cases you get a cleverer solution than the common law. In other cases, you get a cleverer solution in the Roman law, and many cases where the Roman law has very clever solutions. What happens is modern English judges and then American judges simply import the Roman law, wholesale into the system. The Anglo-American law was patch, patch, patch. And so these various statues come in place at different times 'cause each of them have linguistic limitations. That means that they don't cover the entire field. The Roman principles, for the most part, tend to be more unified on this particular issue. And simpler, and in this particular case on property law, the relevant simplicity of the Roman system turns out to be an advantage over the Anglo-American system on the same topic, whereas in other areas, I mean, it's very clear for example, when you're starting to deal with negotiable instruments and things like that. The Romans have not developed these devices. Well what's interesting about them, since they're in the national devices, they're developed and tend to between continental thinkers and the Roman tradition, and the cannon law tradition, and people in the Anglo tradition is no America to worry about at that time. It turns out that these principles have developed in the abstract, but their actual enforcement is done by English courts and by Belgian courts and so forth, and sometime a small differences in the enforcement, but as people who deal with so called conflicts law or the old German term, which is many ways better. “Conflict wreck” that is when the two things collide with one another realize that the best solution to a conflict question is to undo the conflict rather than try to figure out who laws trumps somebody else, and whenever you have these transactions going on across territorial lines, the push towards uniformity is very very powerful. That's why we have a uniform sales act. That's why the international trade agreements tend to be highly standardized and so forth, because if you're constantly worried about whose rule's going to control, even if you deal with that for the first two parts to a transaction, whenever there's a death, an assignment, or resale something else, and you get third and fourth parties into the situation, the variation can really create an incredible mess, and so the effort towards systematization exists as much today as it did in Roman times. PUBLIUS: When you speak about Roman texts, you use Latin words and phrases. Does that mean that one has to be a classicist or historian to study Roman Law? Is the language barrier too great? What about cultural context? RICHARD EPSTEIN: One of the questions that you always have to worry about when you're dealing with ancient system is whether or not the entry fee that you have to pay if you don't know the local language is sufficient to block you from understanding the subject. The answer to that question is yes and no, depending on the kind of inquirer. If you're looking for additions and deletions and alterations of text, either you know Latin or Greek with exquisite precision or it turns out that you will be useless to be able to do that. I could give you a modern analogy if you're trying to figure out whether a text is undoctored in English, you want a native speaker to do it, you don't want a German who's "fluent in English" and the same thing is true if it's a German text; you want the German to do it and not the American who speaks the language. What people don't understand is how powerful their understanding is of their language. The simplest way to describe that is the homonym problem, which is there are many words with completely different meanings that have exactly the sound and you could put them in the same sentence and you put them in context and nobody but nobody is ever confused about their use. It's only when you become a lawyer and you start asking about ambiguity that you slow down that confusion is introduced. But language has this incredible kind of reinforcement in structure that only a native speaker can start to get. So if that's what your task is, then you can't do it. On the other hand, if what your task is is to understand the fundamental relationships that exist, this is the way in which you try to do it. What you do is you take the Roman text and you put it next to the English translation and if you're peculiarly energetic you put it next to two or even three English translations and then start to see the way in which they agree or disagree with one another. All of a sudden, when you start to see the disagreements, it turns out that these are not on the really difficult constructions or linguistic terms that are used in the language; they're on the most simple terms that are imaginable and people could constantly get them wrong because they mistranslate them. Let me give you a couple of very simple examples. Orson, who is a great Latinist, wrote a book which he called Negligence in Civil Law, and this was about the tort system. He picked that particular title, writing in 1950, because negligence was thought in English jurisprudence at the time to be the universal sovereign for all cases, whether they involved aggression against strangers or harms that arose out of consensual arrangements like occupiers' liability, medical malpractice, product viability, kind of an intermediate case. But it turns out that that is just not the correct term. So you go start looking at things and the Romans are constantly using the term "culpa" in saying that somebody is negligent? No, what culpa means in English is culpable. Then the question is, "What does culpable mean in English?" Well, it means blameworthy in some sense or another. And somebody says, "I don't know what that means." The answer is if you don't know what it means in English, why do you assume that they knew what it meant in Latin? So the basic rule of transaction is never to translate something so as to eliminate an important ambiguity in the language. What you have to do is to translate a term like "culpa" into "culpable" in order to preserve the ambiguity as you start to look at the new text. Then when you start deducing why are they using this term, given their sophistication? And it turns out they're doing it for a very simple and powerful reason. There is no single standard of what conduct is or is not blameworthy against another individual. There is a deep contextual kind of arrangement. If you use force against someone else even if you did not mean to hurt them and even if you took all care, then presumptively you're responsible unless there is an affirmative defense based on that plaintiff's conduct (i.e. assumption of risk or trespass by the plaintiff). That's one view. But if you're disciplining a child, you're supposed to be able to use force against that child. And now the question is, "What's the boundary line between property and proper conduct?" Turns out to be a question of whether or not there is an abuse or an excessive force in the situation. So there is this series of Lex Aquilia, which started talking about the distinction or rather the discipline of these particular teachers and then in the Latin it says excessive force by a teacher counts as culpa. This is deliberate abuse of force and he says it's negligence. Well it's not negligence. The standard of culpability when you have a privilege is almost always that you have to be acting in some kind of bad faith or with malice. That's the principle with respect to privilege when we start dealing with the modern law of discipline or the modern law of defamation and so forth. This is a very tight distinction between harms to strangers and harms to people of whom you have an ability to oversee them and they're completely different standards. The Romans always get this thing right in the text and if you mistranslate it, everything goes wrong. PUBLIUS: Can you give any other examples of Roman Law distinctions that rely on careful textual analysis? RICHARD EPSTEIN: To give you another example, one of the great challenges you had in early Roman law in the property area, is what's the situation of somebody who takes possession of property in a province where in fact under Roman law the title either resides in the Emperor on the one hand or in the people through the Senate on the other. The question is, "What's going to happen to everybody else?" So what they do is they create this arrangement known as the usufruct and they said that some ordinary people now have title which can be always usurped by the Crown but at least in ordinary dealings with other private individuals it gives them some protection against them. If you start looking at the Roman text, it turns out that the protection is not quite as good as it would be if they had dominion that is absolute title and they give all sorts of illustrations about this. But then question is, "To what individuals does this apply?" If you look at the Latin text, which is in the first part of the second book of Gaius, the word that they use is " eos", meaning "we". Then if you look de Zulueta translation, the word they use is "individual". Now those are not the same two things and why does it matter? Well, “we” could either mean Roman people or anybody who happens to have property out there and since he's addressing an audience of Roman lawyers, he probably means the first. When you put individual in there, it makes it appear as though aliens are in exactly the same footing as Roman citizens who require property inside the provinces and the Latin doesn't support that. Now, we don't have much more on the Latin but the question you want to ask is, "If this distinction really matters, what is going to be the status of ordinary aliens in their own country? Is it going to be the same as what our citizens have or is it going to be different? Then if it's going to be different, how so, and why? Is it going to be in relationships that private individuals have to each other or is it going to be in relationship to the ability of the state who taxes to occupy?" You can figure it out. But if you mistranslate a simple word like "we" as "individuals", what you're doing is you're taking an implicit universalistic view which is very popular today but is not necessarily in accordance with the Roman text. So the reason you give people both the Latin and the English is you want to make sure that they see these deviations. Here's the third example and I'll stop with this one. There's a famous Latin maxim called “quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem.” This one I've committed to memory and literally what it means is “quod principi,” that which is pleasing unto the prince in the date of case hath the force of law. And this is essentially an assertion of arbitrary power. Obviously it's going to be an enormous tension with the natural law principles that I've just articulated about how individuals ought to be able to relate the one to another. So the question is, "How do you translate that into English?" And sure enough, you read the translation and they deliberately botch it. What they say is "that which the king finds good shall have the force of law". There's no "good" in that sentence! That presupposes that the Emperor is bound by the principles of natural law when the Latin text says exactly the opposite and the real challenge that you have to have is that now when you have this assertion of absolute power of the Empire and you're still trying to run a natural law system, how do you manage to domesticate the Crown when it's beyond power? This is not just a Roman problem, it's a modern problem. The Anglo-American expression used to be "the King can do no wrong" and they meant it rather literally. If he happens to kill somebody, that's not a wrong and so forth. Later we translated it into sovereign immunity and this is a different conception. What that conception means is that it might well be a wrong, but we're not going to allow you to sue the Crown for a whole variety of reasons, namely we think that the sovereign is the law giver ... the sovereign is peppered by suits is not going to be able to discharge its function. And so what we do is we block suit. Is this relevant today? Well, there is this constant question of whether you can sue a sitting President under a criminal charge or whether you have to go to impeachment. This is the Roman debate carried over to modern time and the answer is probably correctly what the Roman solution was. The danger of litigation is so great that we do not wish to have it, which then immediately leads to the next question: "How do we soften this principle? What collateral institutions do we start to put into place?" The modern English Crown Proceedings Act of 1946, American Federal Tort Claims Act of 1947, gave generalized consent to the sovereign to certain suits. Probably something like that was available under Roman times, but we don't know exactly what it was or how it operated. But what happens is if you get the Latin wrong and you read "we" as any individual person, what you do is you simply simplify what's a very, very serious problem and you don't want to be able to do that. So if you're trying to figure out what's going on and you give me the Latin text and I can point it out, the Latin that I'm talking about being mistranslated is not deep and profound construction; it's basic terms and you discover this exists all the way through Roman law no matter what else that you're doing. So the answer is, if you give them both texts and you go back and forth between them, what you can do is learn an amazing amount about the soft underbelly of the Roman law through the mistranslations given by scholars whose knowledge of Latin is much greater than my own, but whose implicit political predilections influence the choice of words that they use in translation. PUBLIUS: How do you teach ancient Roman Law to modern law school students? RICHARD EPSTEIN: What you try to do there is to get them to understand the basic structure, and to do that you spend most of your time starting with Gaius and Justinian's Institutes and then you read several passages from the Digest to get a flavor of the way in which the law and system works. The ones that I have traditionally chosen have been in volumes prepared by modern scholars. One by a man named [Daisuluacu 00:15:37] who is a great Romanist who wrote about the Roman law of sale. And by another great Romanist, F. H. Lawson, who wrote about the Roman law of dealing, which is a cross between tort and criminal law in an area in which we did not have the police force. You want to give people a basic sense of how this stuff works. Once they know that the hope that you have is not that they will remember all the details of Roman law but that they will always be sensitive to the fact that there is an alternative way to look at these kinds of things. Then when they deal with modern cases to understand where this is relevant, and although I won't go into it much here, but perhaps we'll do it on another occasion, there are many many Supreme Court cases that get things absolutely screwed up beyond all recognition because the modern justices are not comfortable with the Roman law cases, with the early English cases, and what we loosely can call the natural law tradition, a term, which for most modernists essentially is laced in mystery and essentially confusion. PUBLIUS: How do you explain to students the basic difference between the legal system they are familiar with, and how it differs from the Roman one? Can we still find the influence of Roman Law in the modern system? RICHARD EPSTEIN: Starting first with the Anglo-American system, the question is, "How is law made over time?" The answer is surely that the dominant players were the judges, whether you're talking about England in Medieval times or American judges. It becomes even more the dominant players with respect to these subjects because we have a very large and rich constitutional law tradition, which essentially allows judges at some level to override decisions of legislatures because there's some higher principle related to another text that seems to trump what the legislation does. It is very difficult to get a very systematic approach when you start to do things in that particular fashion because a) you get dissenting voices and majority voices or you get lines of cases that somehow they get messed up because the facts don't quite align with the doctrine and so forth so that what happens is American professors try to organize the books and, in fact, in the earlier days the most salient term was the use of the word "commentary" of which the most famous commentaries were in those words were Blackstone, who is an English judge who wrote about the English common law and gave commentaries on it in the period roughly between about 1765 and 1770. Then you come to America and we had two great commentators of the early ages. One was Joseph Story who was also a Supreme Court justice, who lived from about 1779 to 1845 who was a prolific justice and wrote these endless commentaries. Commentaries then served two functions. One to give a little bit of analysis, but b) to reproduce in large chunks the salient positions or passages from key opinions so that lawyers who did not have access to West Law or to Lexis, lawyers who did not even have a full set of the reports in their offices, could look to the commentators in order to find the relevant passages from law which they would cite. This constant effort to try to get the commentaries did create to some extent the degree of unification in the law. One of the things that you discovered is that the common intuition is that Roman law and common law on fundamentals would differ widely. But it turns out on basic principles the correlation at least within a private law system is about 95-99% on most points. What typically happens is juris prudence people love to deal with hard cases. Those are the ones that create divisions both within a given legal system and across legal systems. A wonderful article written some 30-odd years ago, my colleague Saul Levmore at the University of Chicago, pointed out that if you take the standard chestnuts of difficult issues arising under both common and Roman law any comparative study will show you that the differences within any legal system of opinion on a given point will be no greater or no less than the kind of differences of opinion that you have across legal systems. These problems are intrinsically difficult. The one that he referred to, which is well worth remembering, is the conflict between the true owner and the bona fide purchaser of value. Essentially what happens is the true owner either has his property stolen or puts it in the hands of somebody for safekeeping, a person called the bailee, that bailee essentially then sells it to a third party. That thief then sells it to a third party who is innocent of any part of the wrong-doing and there's this constant tension as to whether or not the true owner can be stripped of his property by virtue of the wrongful acts of a third party over which he had either no or limited control. You draw all sorts of very elegant distinctions. They take place in all legal systems, but it's important to understand that the basic cast of characters that you had in Roman law are identical to those you had in Colonial times, which are identical to those you have under the modern legal system. One of the things that is important to understand about legal principles, since we're dealing for the most part with ordinary mid-sized human interactions between ordinary individuals, the same kind of tendencies for honesty on the one hand and treachery on the other, that existed in Roman law, carried over to England, carried over to the Colonial periods, carried over to today. The sorts of problems that you're dealing with, how do you deal simply with aggression on the one hand and fraud on the other, are constants of social life. It's exactly the fact that these problems are constant, which explain why it is that the Roman solutions and the early English solutions in effect can carry over with great insight to modern times. PUBLIUS: Do you have a unique approach to the study of Roman Law? RICHARD EPSTEIN: Okay. One of the things that should be evident from the stuff that I said thus far, I am not a conventional Roman lawyer. The conventional Roman lawyers come from very different times and backgrounds. Most of them have some training in law, perhaps, but if so it's in the European system, where the emphasis is upon classification and organization, which is the way in which the 19-century scholars worked, and the effort to try to find functionality, optimality, relating it to gang theory or linguistic theory, is really not part of their bag of tricks. These people know all kinds of stuff that I never know, and if you ever wanna meet a classicist and make that particular person happy, all you need to do is to find a shard or a piece of text which contains a thousand words of Roman law or Roman history and they will spend time interpreting and getting it right, putting in the conquest, telling how it all does the various system, and they're through. I could care less about those things because the grand scheme of things, what happens in an isolated transaction in Mesopotamia 300 years after Justinian digest is written tells you a lot less than reading the digest particularly closely. So then the question is, what are the techniques that you use? And they're trying to figure out classification, which I accept and think they did a brilliant job, and I'm trying to figure out functionality. Why this system lasts, how it worked, what it was put together, why is it that this contract is strictly juris, that is you have a very precise enforcement deterrent, and that contract is bonafide. I don't want to just say it, I want to explain it and understand it, and then carry it forward to modern times. So we get ourselves into very odd situations. I know enough Roman law now that I'm actually asked from time to time to write incompliations that are published on this particular field, and several years ago, I was asked to write in 6,000 words a discussion on the Roman law of property. Some people got 6,000 words to talk about a particular text that had been found in Mesopotamia, and we all meet in Edinburgh to talk about these things and I'm very much the odd man out at this particular session because they're all classists. They know this stuff inside and out, and I'm working in this exactly opposite way, so I write an essay that says the fundamental problem that you have in Roman law is how to deal with divided interest, land, law, tenant, mortgage or mortgagee, owner vs. bailee, and things of that sort, and they're send me texts which said, "Haven't you discussed the question of what the yield is in the sale of agriculture in the republicas opposed to the empire and Nile valley?" I said, "The Roman law was not concerned with this. I went through and I read through all of these books actually. Three or four. Skimmed them probably. And what you discovered is, they're very interesting topics, but they completely were thought wrong, because those were simple transactions, where one person owns the grain and sells it to somebody else, and the really hard stuff is where you sell the things and then it turns out that you have a right to some fractions of the gains, if the properties resold to somebody else. How do you enforce that right against whom becomes the real question." So I basically said, "I can't write, I'm not that." So I talked about divided interest and how they all put together, and it was very different feel and texture from the other. Recently I did something on Roman pleading for another conception called the law and economics of Roman laws, and then getting it right, but the dominant people there are Romanists who learn law and economics rather than law and economics. I thought to myself, "Well in Roman law..." and there was one particular passage that I found in a book, which actually seemed to understand how Roman pleading worked. And so I referenced it, and when the referees reports came back, they began with, "How dare anybody cite a text that's a hundred years old which is self-published by an author?" As opposed to one of the recipient, and then they gave me a series of recognized scholars that had written about similar topics. It turned out that the old guy who was the one that I wanted, the other guys were talking about something else, but you can see essentially, the way I wished it worked. I do not care at all about pedigree. I only care about the soundness of arguments, and these people care about pedigree much as though they're collecting works of art, and so they have very different standards on the way these things work. So sometime when we get into discussions your talking past one another. I, at this point, had been around these people long enough, so I do understand, for the most part, the world that they're coming from, because when I was at Oxford in which I was trained, they, for the most part, do not understand the odd world that I'm coming from. It's not as though there's a squad of people out there that do law and economics that have the same interests that I have in Roman law. So I'm a lone figure in this particular area, but I think that's exactly where you wanna be. This is, I think, part of the area in which there's room for enormous intellectual growth and if you got a quasi monopoly, 'cause everybody else is interested in the other kinds of pedigree, then you push it for all it's worth. I have no question that when you're trying to sell Roman law to outsiders. Trying to explain to then why the system works and what they can learn from their own areas is a lot more interesting to them than to figure out what it is that this particular word is in the dative instead of in the ablative or something of that particular sort. So I'm not interested in that, and I'm not confident for doing it. As ever, I'm not trying to claim an exclusive, other people continue to work in other ways, but I think that if somebody wanted to make room in law, a topic of interest to contemporary people, the way in which I'm doing it is better in the high enrollments in which you see for this class is a good evidence of it. When I give lectures on Roman law at NYU, as I do from time to time, you always get a respectable audience, 40, 50, 60 people is a lot for this thing, as you start talking about the niceties of the Lex Aquilia, well the Roman contract of stipulation. NARRATOR: Thank you for listening to this episode in the Roman Law unit of the No. 86 lecture series. The spirit of debate of our Founding Fathers animates all of the No. 86 content, encouraging discussion and critical reflection relative to how each subject is widely understood and taught in law schools and among law students. Subscribe to the No. 86 Lecture series on your favorite podcast platform to have each episode delivered the moment it’s released. You can also go to fedsoc.org/no86 for more lectures and videos on Property, Contracts, and the Common Law. Thanks for listening. See you in class!