ERC Project

The Making of Local Legal Cultures under Rome: A View from the Margins

Law and order were Rome’s vehicles for displaying its imperial authority and supremacy over non-Roman subjects. However, Rome did not fill a legal vacuum; rather, it competed with established legal practices among communities in the Greek East. These communities took pride in their legal traditions, as they were being absorbed into the Roman legal order. Consequently, the sphere of law served provincials as a major arena for negotiating Roman power and demarcating their own local identities: what customs to maintain and what trends to resist?

Despite scholarly interest in the plurality of laws under Rome, this project proposes an innovative cross-disciplinary study of these local legal cultures as an expression of provincial agency and self-determination. While previous studies were limited to the scattered remains of legal activities in the Greek East on papyri or on inscriptions, it is the premise of this project that only by integrating the hitherto neglected body of Jewish jurisprudence we may gain access into provincial perceptions of their legal cultures. Early rabbinic literature (1^st-3^rd centuries CE), which has been marginalized as an isolated phenomenon, is in fact the only comprehensive source of local law-making under Rome and is therefore the most appropriate framework for studying provincial legalisms in all of their forms.

By applying a multi-dimensional comparative analysis of key legal fields, from legal papyrology through the study of Roman Law in the Provinces to the study of Rabbinic law, Local Law under Rome provides a structured method including the following stages for proceeding towards a new understanding of subordinate legal discourse: First, the project contextualizes each system of local law separately against the background of Roman legal administration and local traditions. Next, it discerns patterns of integration across different legal traditions, and finally it characterizes the distinct nature of provincial legalism, as means for cultural and political distinction in circumstances of law without power.

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