Law and Justice - Roman Law and Human Rights - 14.
5 Slavery and Status
Janux 4,832 Transcript >>>>Dr. Kyle Harper: In continuing to try to understand the way that status structures the rights and obligations of the individual in Roman law, we should look at the way that status is structured in Roman law itself. The law of persons is the most fundamental part of Roman law. A system of rules that describe different statuses within society, and which provide different obligations and rights according to one's legal status. Roman law says the most fundamental division in the law of persons is between freemen and slaves. It says that all men are either free or slaves, and in fact not all legal systems have been like this. In fact, in some sense there were probably societies in or around the Roman Empire where they're divisions of society into multiple status with serfs and other kinds of intermediate statuses between free and slave. But Roman law says that there is this absolute and fundamental division. All people are free or they're slaves, and if you're free person you have the rights and privileges and obligations that are attendant upon that status, and if you're a slave you have severe restrictions on the kinds of powers that you are able to exercise, and you are subject to certain severe kinds of power because you are specifically a piece of property. You are in the ownership you are in the dominium of an owner, a master. We'll talk more about slavery. Roman law goes on to specify that some freemen were in fact freed men, liberti, that some men who are free are freed meaning that they were formerly slaves but that their masters chose to emancipate them. This is an extraordinary part of the Roman law of slavery that slaves can be manumitted and become free persons. And the Roman law of persons accounts for this kind of transformation. It specifies how a person can be manumitted, what the conditions are, and what the consequences of manumission are, because someone who is a freed person in many cases still has some kinds of residual obligations to their master who's now no longer their master, but their patron. So in effect you begin to see immediately in the Roman law of persons that this absolute
distinction between free persons and slaves is immediately complicated by
an important division within the class of free persons, because this category has another kind of status: freed men who actually have certain kinds of rights and certain kinds of obligations vis--vis their patron specifically because of their status. And so those kinds of rights and obligations that flow out of that derive from your position: free, freed, slave. Those are what Maine calls status. Those are what we mean when we say Roman laws is a legal system that provides for extraordinary differences according to your place within the community. Na-publish noong Hul 29, 2014 Law and Justice" is a free online course on Janux that is open to anyone. Learn more at http://janux.ou.edu. Created by the University of Oklahoma, Janux is an interactive learning community that gives learners direct connections to courses, education resources, faculty, and each other. Janux courses are freely available or may be taken for college credit by enrolled OU students. Dr. Kyle Harper is Associate Professor of Classics and Letters, Video by NextThought (http://nextthought.com). Copyright 2000-2014 The Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, All Rights Reserved. Lahat ng Mga Komento Maglagay ng pampublikong komento... Walang maipapakitang komento MeasureMeasure Get a free Evernote account to save this article and view it later on any device. Create account