Legal Artifices: Ten Essays on Roman Law in the Present Tense

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Presents for the first time in English ten essays of Yan Thomas (1943-2008), whose contributions to Roman law revolutionised legal scholarship. Western legal professionals habitually rely on a version of legal history that bolsters their own sway over the present. The legal mythologies undergirding these self-serving proposals are divided between doctrines of law's immemorial nature, and of its sacred (Roman) origins. Thomas's de-mythicized jurisprudence dismisses these sagas. The seismic waves that his work has sent across the humanities and social sciences include, as illustrated in this volume, the claims that: ● Law is not a set of rules, but the operation of legal arguments. Lawyers are the agents of the legal denaturalization of the world. ● Rome is misread as an essentially political entity. The effect exercised on Roman society by its jurists ranks before that of its politicians. ● Despite a widely accepted opposition between modern labour law and the Roman renting-out of a slave's workforce, there exist unexpected commonalities. ● 'Legal order' and 'responsibility' are among the inventions of modern law. They are not part of the timeless inventory of the world. Yan Thomas, a French Roman law scholar, taught at the École des Hautes Études (Paris).