ABSTRACT
It has already been suggested in the previous chapter that, if scientific method is a process of development from the descriptive and inductive to the deductive and axiomatic, then the methods of the Roman jurists can be classed in the former. Roman jurists took legal science into the inductive stage. That they never really went beyond this stage is evident from a number of texts, the chief
amongst them being the observation that rules were not the source of law. They were only brief summaries of what the law is.6 What actually formed the source of law in the knowledge sense is more difficult to determine, in that the Romans were not interested in formulating definitions and theories. Indeed, they were of the view that all definitions were dangerous.7 However, what seems clear is that the search for solutions to particular litigation problems was to be found within the circumstances of each case; in causa ius esse positum, observed one jurist before analysing the facts of a relatively complex accident case.8 The law (ius) is to be found in the causal aspects of facts.
