The Edinburgh Roman Law Group: How Does an Emperor Follow the Law?
Location:
Online only
Date/time
Fri 24 November 2023
17:00-18:30
Political and literary discourse from the Roman Principate (31 B.C.E.–235 C.E.) frequently refers to ‘the emperor who follows the law.’ This trope initially seems to conflict with our understandings of Roman law and autocracy but is too frequent to be truly incompatible with either in the Roman imaginary. In this talk, Prof. Herz considers several examples of emperors ostentatiously engaging with law in the manner of a legal subject, and show(s) how they can guide us towards a more authentically Roman idea of the relationships between law, order, and legal order.
About the speaker
Zach Herz (J.D. Yale '14, Ph.D. Columbia '18) studies the role of law and legalism in Roman political thought. He focuses particularly on the evolving notion of the 'princeps who obeys the law,' and on rules of recognition within juristic writing. He has written on the role of precedent in imperial legislation and on proceduralism in Cassius Dio; his current book project, tentatively titled The God and the Bureaucrat: A Political Analysis of a Severan Legal Project, considers the rise of bureaucratic legalism as a desideratum in Severan political and intellectual culture. Future projects include a broader study of citation in different genres of Latin and Greek writing, and of how historiographers of the imperial period juxtapose adjudication and military activity.