ABSTRACT
This final chapter aims to draw out specific common themes from this volume's individual chapters. This will be done using references to Roman law as the proverbial DNA underpinning the Scottish law of property and the corresponding branch of law in the newly enacted Chinese Civil Code. Before this task can be undertaken, however, it is important to make a few remarks concerning the function of Roman law in this context, especially given the comments by Zimmermann concerning the limitations created by a Civil Code, as discussed by Huang in her chapter. Roman law has fulfilled several constructive roles in the history of the civilian tradition. In the context of codification, its role has usually been to tidy up the rather unkempt state of the law before codification and to reduce the law to elegant and clear statements of law framed together with great precision to form an internally coherent civil code. As the codification experience in Germany has shown, the subsequent role of Roman law after codification has been, by and large, to act as a propaedeutic introduction to the code's provisions. This collection shows that the purpose of Roman law can be more expansive in developing jurisprudence and doctrine surrounding the Chinese Civil Code. It does not need to function solely as a teaching tool for students of the code. Instead, it may be used to ask probing questions concerning issues of choice of language in translation, as well as intellectual origins of specific provisions within the code.
