Roman Law (Delict)
The Roman Law option focuses on set texts from the Institutes and Digest. Its primary aim is to understand those texts and the ideas and methods of the great Roman jurists who wrote them. The secondary aim is, by comparison, to throw light on the law of our own time. It caters for the interests of those who are interested in making use of their classical background or of developing the knowledge of Roman law they have acquired by taking the ‘A Roman Introduction to Private Law’ course in Law Moderations, although it is not essential to have done the Roman Law course for Mods. It allows students to study in some detail the outlook and methods of reasoning of the classical jurists who provide the models on which professional legal argument has ever since been based. In practice this will lead to discuss fundamentals of the law of delicts/torts, aided by the comparison with English cases. The lectures are based, so far as the Roman law is concerned, on the set texts, in Latin. For the BCl knowledge of Latin is therefore required. Indeed, one of the advantages of this course from the point of view of students is that the body of relevant texts and other authoritative material is more limited than it is in most, perhaps all, the other options. It is possible to concentrate on detail. In the examination candidates are required to comment on selections from a part of the set texts, in Latin, and on questions regarding the literature given for the texts.