ABSTRACT

Legal institutions not only have a role in organising the facts, they are also, in the Roman tradition at least, a fundamental starting point for the organisation of the law. Accordingly, persons (personae), things (res) and actions (actiones) form the starting point of legal classification by giving rise to the general categories of the law of persons, law of things and law of actions. In the modern codes, these actual Roman categories have been modified. The two sub-categories of the law of things – that is to say the law of property and the law of obligations – have been elevated to a generic role, and the law of actions has now been relegated to separate procedural codes.37 The rules that attach to the various institutions are thus classified within categories that reflect their institutional bias and it is, inter alia, via this bias that the categories themselves relate to the ‘non-legal’ (or social, for want of a better term) world.