ABSTRACT
Within the legal traditions of the West, those interested in understanding the authority of law in terms of the order of its jurisdictions have often had an interest in the legacy of Roman law. This is at least partly because Roman law provides an historical and textual nexus between classical and Christian codifications of European sociality.1 The jurisprudence of Rome forms an enduring model for disparate ages of Western legal and moral thought. It is thus convincingly suggested that the structures and arrangements of Roman civil law continue to form part of the grounds of modern social science more generally, such that the rubrics of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ which in the early jurisprudence appear part of a creative and pedagogical textual arrangement, form something far more implicit and structural in relation to contemporary social and political thought. As Alain Pottage summarizes:
There is a powerful argument that the institutional architecture of Roman law still structures our apprehension of society, and that sociology and political theory are far more ‘juridical’ than they imagine themselves to be, precisely because they presuppose a basic division between persons and things.2
