This collection of papers was presented at a conference organised by the Edinburgh Roman Law Group in 2005. This group, the brainchild of the late Peter Birks – a brilliant jurist and sometime Professor of Civil Law in the University of Edinburgh – is an interdisciplinary forum dedicated to the study of civil law and the civilian tradition in its historical context. It attracts a wide audience consisting of students, members of the public and specialists, and it usually meets on three occasions during the course of the academic year within the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. At each of these occasions, the group is addressed by a distinguished scholar in the field.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the Edinburgh Roman Law Group, it seems fitting that the first volume produced by it should also have a wide focus. The theme of this volume is “law and society”, a topic which has attracted much interest in legal scholarship both current and historical during the last decade. The broad aim of this collection is to address two perennial questions within this debate. First, whether law is a product of the society that produces it and, second, whether it should necessarily be assumed that a close relationship between law and society exists. The authors in this volume have taken Roman law, a body of legal rules which has had an enduring influence on much of contemporary private law in Western Europe and elsewhere, as the subject of their investigation.