This chapter shows how late-antique emperors and bureaucrats looked to the jurists to understand how Classical Roman law worked, and thus built an entirely new legal system in order to put their ideas into practice. I first discuss how post-Severan emperors represented themselves in rescripts as explaining a settled and sovereign law, rather than making new law themselves. I then consider innovations in the indexing of imperial rescripts, which combined rescripts of multiple emperors into new collections organized by subject matter; these collections treated rescripts as legal documents, rather than nonsystematic interventions from an absolute ruler. I then consider how the massive expansions in imperial staffing and bureaucracy that mark the late-antique period, as well as an increase in the frequency and systematicity of legal education, could lead to regularized adjudicative outcomes that better tracked the dictates of juristic law. I finally contrast the treatment of juristic texts and resccripts in the Codex Theodosianus, showing how that text implicitly elevates jurists over emperors and how that elevation flows from broader changes in legal culture of the period.

My introduction considers the rhetorical mechanics of Roman legal writing, and isolates three distinct discursive modes in which legal writing represents the world: the normative, the descriptive, and the constructive. I then discuss the ideological valence of law in the Roman imagination, with reference to Cicero’s description of the ideal magistrate as a “talking law.” I finally provide a plan of the work.

This chapter considers the concept of the emperor who obeys the law, which persists throughout the Principate but which emerged in the late first century CE. I first discuss the lex de imperio Vespasiani, which portrayed imperial power as the object of a senatorial grant and thus constructs Vespasian as a kind of legally empowered agent rather than an omnipotent sovereign. I then discuss an edict of the emperor Titus which reaffirmed prior imperial grants en masse, and argue that this not only made it possible for emperors to exercise more granular control over the Roman world, but also analogized Titus’ position as Vespasian’s successor to that of a son succeeding his father under the Roman law of obligations. Finally I consider how Pliny describes Trajan’s engagement with law in the Panegyricus, and how Trajan uses law as a medium for the performance of legal and political subjecthood.

This chapter considers the impact of Justinian’s codification on our understanding of Classical Roman law. After reading the introductory constitutions in order to understand how Justinian used the Corpus Iuris to represent himself, I discuss the tendency of constitutions contained within the Codex Justinianus to avoid explicit disagreement. Justinian is the one emperor who regularly criticizes his predecessors in the Codex, which suggests that other conflict was redacted out in the compilation process. I then use a passage of Pomponius, discussing a strange hypothetical involving a cross-dressing senator, to argue that jurists were more engaged with other literary genres (like paradoxography) than is obvious from fragments which survive in the Digest, and that the redactive tendency to treat juristic treatises as sources of law has greater distorting effects than is immediately apparent.

This chapter considers how Severan jurists responded to political crisis. After describing the political dynamics that made jurists such important players in Severan administration, I discuss two rhetorical features of Severan juristic writing: Severan jurists’ tendency to describe jurisprudence in terms of its beneficial effects on the world rather than its elegance or internal morality, and their increasing use of anonymous citational forms like “emperors have written” rather than citing individual authorities by name. These maneuvers reconstructed imperial lawmaking as a static, impersonal field of knowledge and made interpretation, the job of the jurist, into the critical act that constituted Roman legality.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the rescript system – a paradigm in which emperors used correspondence to settle legal questions – over the second century CE. This paradigm is most closely linked with the emperor Hadrian, and I consider three major legal innovations from Hadrian’s reign: Hadrian replacing the annually renewed Praetor’s Edict with a Perpetual Edict under more formal imperial control, Hadrian sunsetting the “right of response” which had formerly been given to individual jurists, and Hadrian’s vast expansion of the imperial bureaucracy and correspondence system. I then consider how imperial legal replies, or “rescripts,” could represent imperial sovereignty in a variety of different modes, from the collaborative and deliberative style of the Diui Fratres to the more bureaucratic and concise mode visible in documents like P.Col.123.