567 research outputs found
Law, Religion, and Constitution of the Vestal virgins
No full textThe aim of this paper is to put the Vestals at the center of legal, religious, and political life in the Roman republic as was done by lawyers, historians, and poets. With their virgin bodies they represented the separation of the legal, religious, and political spheres of Roman life, the domestication of raw power through division. As sovereign figures, the Vestals would wander freely among the religious world of the aedes Vestae, in which they were subject to the sacral jurisdiction of the pontifex maximus, the legal world, where they acted as personae sui iuris, and the political Rome, in which magistrates would honor them as symbols of the state, lowering their fasces before the Vestals' "public virginity." As a "living constitution" or "totem" of the republic, the Vestals stood as guardians at the border of civilization and chaos
Der gescheiterte Codex: Überlegungen zur Kodifikationsgeschichte des Codex Theodosianus
No full textThe Codex of Emperor Theodosius II, dating from the 5th century A.D., is generally considered to be a failed piece of legislation; as a law book, however, it was quite successful. By looking at Theodosius’ failure, this essay tries to establish general criteria for making a distinction between successful codification projects and unsuccessful ones. Instead of following a more traditional approach by telling the success story of a given codification, the study focuses on a »pathological« legal project. In the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, it lacked a sufficient amount of »internal«, intrinsic authority, because it encompassed too many out-dated laws while neglecting the binding character of the ones actually in force. By forgoing the establishment of a hierarchical order of norms, however, a codification’s ability to function is severely diminished. In the Western half of the Empire the situation was somewhat different: here the Codex Theodosianus met with an unstable political situation; under these circumstances it never had a chance of functioning properly. After all, a codification is not a suitable remedy against the loss of political, i.e. »external« authority
Privatautonomie von Todes wegen. Verfassungs- und zivilrechtliche Grundlagen der Testierfreiheit im Vergleich zur Vertragsfreiheit unter Lebenden
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