This chapter considers how the paradigm of the imperial judge, discussed in Chapter 3, was challenged by the political unrest and legitimacy crises of the Severan period. It does so through a close analysis of rescripts attributed to the child emperor Severus Alexander. Alexander’s rescripts exhibit two unusual rhetorical tendencies. First, several of them predate Alexander’s reign and are in fact relabeled rescripts of his disgraced predecessor Elagabalus; this relabeling shows that the link between imperial authorship and legitimacy had become more tenuous in the late Severan period. Second, rescripts of Alexander are unusually likely to portray the emperor as following prior imperial precedent and especially those precedents of his Severan forebears. I argue that both maneuvers can be thought of as a response to the problems posed by child rule; while Alexander’s own judgment might not be legitimate, his rescripts paint him as a caretaker for a dynastic legal order that was.

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.

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 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.

The authority of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī, the second in the canonical sequence of envoys, emerged around the time when the old guard agents of the eleventh Imam were dying, two decades after the Imam’s death. The process of back-projection of the envoy paradigm to the earliest phase of the Occultation has obscured details of Abū Jaʿfar’s life, but we can piece together, in Chapter 5, some details from reports of opposition to Abū Jaʿfar from both skeptical agents and rival charismatic bābs. He established his authority through his father’s prestige, by forging alliances with other agents, by repudiating doubters, and issuing rescripts (tawqīʿāt) in the name of the hidden Imam. He also attempted to maintain revenues, giving concessions and dispensations for alms taxes, while asserting the legitimacy of the Imamic agents to continue revenue-collection, particularly from waqf endowments and Imamic estates. Through these activities he established the office of envoy firmly enough to survive him.