ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the interpretive methods used by common lawyers. It shows by elaboration that the distinctive way in which private lawyers construed the central propositions of common law, and the statutes that were so much a part of private law as to blend into the common law, provides the best clue of how to engage in the business of constitutional interpretation. The chapter examines one statute that has been subject to an enormous amount of common law elaboration: not the common law of the own system, but the common law as it developed casuistically in Rome, where the rules of tort law were remarkably similar to the own. The historical remoteness of the Roman law system is, for these purposes, a point in favor of making the comparison. The chapter addresses the term, the Lex Aquilia, the Roman statute that codifies much of the tort law of ancient Rome.
