Some thoughts on the pre-eminence of Roman Law

Abstract

MANY of you will have already heard the saying that if Greece has given us the statue, Rome has given us the obligation and I daresay that few of us have considered that these two great relics of the past share a particular quality in common: namely their solidity; for, while the Greek statue is in itself an expression of solidity, in matter and in design, the Roman viculurn iuris is in itself a powerful tie, a ligatio of the very person, solid in content and in form. Of course, the Roman legal heritage does not consist only in the law of Obligations; however, in the general notion of the obligation, I am at present visualising the binding force of all law, since in all its manifestations, speaking generally, law does not do any more than create rights and correlative obligations. It is by means of the existence and enforcement of the obligation that we see law put into effect and it is exactly in that quarter that our greatest debt to the Romans lies. In point of fact, the obligation is the legal counterpart of the well-known Romana fides which was a solid rock on which Roman Republican civilization reclined.