Roman Law and Economics (Video)
- [Music]
- I'm Dennis Kehoe, professor in the department of classical
- studies at Tulane, where I've taught since 1982.
- The focus of my research is on the society and economy of the Roman empire
- and in particular on the complex role in these played by Roman law
- and legal institutions. We can see the products of the Roman economy
- and the spectacular archaeological remains from ancient Rome
- including temples in the Roman forum, amphitheaters in Rome and other cities,
- aqueducts, imperial villas, and the impressive houses at Pompeii.
- Underpinning these material remains was an economy
- that as in all pre-industrial societies was dominated by agriculture.
- Consequently, most of my own research has been on
- agrarian relationships to see how upper class Romans engaged in
- economic planning, and how the Roman imperial government
- formulated policies in an economy subject to constraints imposed by
- population and technology. One basic question concerns whether
- Roman law played a positive role in the economy
- by providing incentives for investment and greater productivity.
- The Roman government would have accomplished this purpose
- by developing a system of law that defined
- and property rights precisely and by maintaining authoritative legal
- institutions to facilitate the resolution of disputes
- in a timely, straightforward, and predictable manner.
- The alternatives are that the law and legal institutions serve
- primarily to promote the interests of well-connected groups
- even at the expense of society as a whole, or that they were weak
- and thus exercised little influence on how people
- organized their economic lives. These questions are, in my view, crucial
- for understanding the nature of Roman rule.
- Whether it simply fostered the interest of the privilege,
- or whether and to what extent it provided benefits more broadly.
- Answering these questions requires ingenuity
- in teasing out information about economic relationships
- from a variety of sources of evidence. For my part, I've written on land tenure
- in Roman north Africa largely on the basis of inscriptions
- on the management of estates in Roman Egypt
- using documentary papyri, and on the economic planning of a Roman senator
- using literary sources. In recent years, the focus of my research has been on
- reconstructing economic relationships from the ways in
- which the Roman legal authorities developed rules for
- various aspects of private property and commercial
- activity including: land tenure, risk in
- agriculture, the bequeathing of land and other
- property, and various forms of agency. The Roman legal authorities include the
- classical Roman jurists, who over time developed rules for Roman
- private law, and the Roman emperors and their legal
- advisors who modified the law or even created new
- law as they responded to petitions from
- people across the empire. This legal material is preserved in the
- digest and the Codex of Justinian.
- The field of ancient history has long been open
- to interdisciplinary approaches and ancient historians have drawn on
- scholarship in anthropology, economics, law, and even sociology and
- political science. The new institutional economics and the
- related field of law and economics have enriched my own research by
- providing a theoretical perspective for investigating the economic
- implications arising from various types of property rights
- and contractual relationships. The new institutional
- economics suggests ways to understand the incentives guiding economic planning
- in light of basic constraints on our decision making
- such as the costliness of information and the influences of overarching social
- values on our behavior. In recent years, there's been a new trend
- in interdisciplinarity involving the ancient world as scholars
- from both the fields of economics and law have become interested in the
- ancient world. For economists, the relatively simple
- economy of the Roman empire provides a way to test theories about
- economic relationships while legal historians see in Roman law
- the roots of the ways in which later societies,
- including our own, have addressed basic economic issues.
- My most recent publication, a two-volume collection of essays titled
- Roman Law and Economics and published by Oxford University Press,
- brings together scholars from classics, economics, and law
- to tackle a wide range of issues in Roman society such as: slavery and
- manumission, the organization of businesses in the
- ancient world, agency in the roman economy, and the
- economic consequences of both Roman legal policies
- and individual legal rules. The collection was the idea of
- Giuseppe Dari Mattiacci, the co-editor, an Italian economist
- who has studied classics and maintained an interest
- in the ancient world. Giuseppe invited me in 2009
- to participate in a seminar held at the University of Amsterdam Center for Law
- and Economics, where he was then teaching. He has since
- moved to Columbia University School of Law.
- When I arrived in Amsterdam I learned that my invitation was on the
- recommendation of a mutual dear friend, Elio Lo Cascio,
- now emeritus professor of the University La Sapienza in Rome.
- Professor Lo Cascio ranks as one of the foremost authorities in Roman history
- in the world today. Professor Lo Cascio also provided me with a springboard for
- my own contribution to this collection- an essay on the Roman contract of
- mandate, which defined the legal rights and
- obligations of the parties when one-person voluntary voluntarily
- carries out significant financial transactions
- on behalf of another without being paid to do so.
- I first started researching mandate when professor Lo Cascio
- invited me to participate in an annual seminar on Roman law
- at the University of Pavia in Italy in 2013.
- My assignment was to talk about the ways in which the Roman jurists
- treated legal problems when people were managing property on behalf of others.
- To turn to the Roman law and economics volumes,
- my colleague Giuseppe Dari Mattiacci, had the vision for the project
- and he invited an array of scholars from fields ancient and modern to participate.
- My original role was as a contributor, but I soon began helping with the
- editing and eventually became co-editor. I will
- have to say that this was a lot of work, but it was worthwhile because I learned
- a great deal. We both hope that the collection will
- help draw together scholars in many fields
- into a richer dialogue. Thank you.
- [Music]