The genius of Roman Empire legal system | Gregory Aldrete and Lex Fridman

one of the most influential developments from the Roman Republic was their legal system and as you mention it's one of the things that's still lasted to this day in many of its elements uh so it started with the 12 tables in 451 BC can you just speak to this legal system and the 12 tables yeah I mean Roman law is one of their most significant maybe the most significant Legacy they have on the modern world so I mean just to start at that end of it something like you know 90 % of the world uses a legal system which is either directly or indirectly derived from the Roman one so even countries that you wouldn't think are really using Roman law kind of are because all the terminology all that comes from Roman law um and the Romans their first law code was this thing the 12 tables so this is way back in the middle Republic uh and it was a typical early law code so most of the stuff it concerns are uh agricultural concerns so if I have a tree and its fruit drops onto your property who owns the fruit if my cow wanders into your field and eats your grain am I responsible I mean I love these early law codes that are all about this like farmer problems you know um but law codes are hugely important because you need a law code to enable people to live in groups so they're the transitional thing that lets human beings live together without just resorting to Anarchy and most of the early law codes are agricultural like Tamar robi's code in Mesopotamia most of them are retaliatory meaning uh eye for an eye type justice so you do something to me it gets done to you but there are this necessary precondition for civilization I would say and the 12 tables is that it's a crude law code it has a lot of goofy stuff in it it has things about you know if you use magic this is the punishment um but it's that basic agrarian society law code now that's typical of many societies where the RO R an are different is they keep going they keep developing their law code and by the late Republic uh the Romans just get kind of really into legal stuff I don't know why but um and the Romans are very methodical organized people so maybe this has something to do with it um but that their law code just get keeps getting more and more complicated uh and keeps expanding to different areas and they start to get jurists who write sort of theoretical things about Roman law um and eventually it becomes this huge body both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws and in the 6th Century ad so the 500s um the Roman Emperor Justinian who is a u emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire by this point the Byzantine Empire compiles all this together into something that today we just kind of loosely call Justinian's code of Roman law and that survives and so that becomes the basis for almost all the legal systems around the world and it's very complicated and Roman law I think is really fun because on the one hand it's really dry but it also preserves these wonderful little uh vignettes of daily life so you get these great just kind of entertaining law cases uh one of my favorite and this may not even be a real case this might be a hypothetical that they would use like to train Roman sort of you know law students is like one day a man sends a slave to the barber to get a shave and the barber shop is adjacent to an athletic field and two guys are on the athletic field throwing a ball back and forth and one of them throws the ball badly the other guy fails to catch it the ball flies into the barber shop hits the hand of the barber cuts the slave's throat he dies who's liable under Roman law is it the athlete one who threw the ball badly is it athlete two who failed to catch it is the barber who actually cut the slave's throat is it the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his slave to get a shave in a place adjacent to a playing field or is it the Roman State ver in a barber shop next to an athletic field what do you think well do they resolve the complexity of that with the right answer we don't have the answer we don't have the answer it's a case without uh the answer so we know we have various uh jurists commenting on this one but we don't have what was actually ruled but it's just a great little you know sort of vignette um and that's how complicated Roman law got that it was dealing with these weird esoteric questions um there's another one where you know a cow get gets loose and runs into an apartment building goes up onto the roof and crashes down three stories into a bar on the ground floor and kicks open the Taps to the wine jug and all the wine flows out who's at fault I mean this seems to have happened is is crazy as it sounds um and and Roman testamentary law is great I mean something like 20% of Roman law has to do with wills and what you do with the will and what makes a will valid uh you know you have to have seven Witnesses and you have to have a guy named a liberen to Wi winess it and the witnesses have to be adult men who can't be blind and all this other stuff um so it's just great I mean it's fun to mess around in this but it always contains these little nuggets about what happens um I mentioned I wrote a book on floods and there were all these law cases about if a flood strikes the city and picks up my piece of furniture in my apartment building and carries it out the door and deposits it in another apartment building does that guy now own my furniture because it's now legally within his apartment or can I go in there and repos possess it cuz the flood took it out of my apartment you know this is the stuff laws handle and that's how sophisticated Roman law got did kind of corrupt unfair things seep into the law oh yeah I mean it it's biased in favor of the wealthy obviously and I mean um you know Roman um law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics so one of the way that politicians upand cominging politicians aspiring politicians could sort of make their name or become famous was by either Prosecuting or defending people in Roman Law Courts and especially during the late Roman Republic uh you get a lot of really Sensational what today we' call celebrity law cases so this is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of very melodramatic kinds of things um and I mean the most famous Roman order of all time Cicero uh is a guy who made his entire career in the Law Courts and that's how he made his reputation was able to Parlay that into political power and eventually was elected to the highest office in the Roman government but it's purely because of his skill his facility at using words um at at giving speeches in public so they loved the puzzle and the game of law the the sort of uh untangling really complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws that help you tangle and untangle the the situation and law cases again especially in the late Republic also became a form of public spectacle right so Rome did not have uh Law Courts in a building locked away a lot of these cases were held in the Roman Forum in the open and audiences would just come to be entertained and the people presenting the speeches there were playing as much to this audience as they were to let's say the jury or a judge and that became a big part of the cases so that that's all tied up in Roman oratory too we're talking a bit about the details uh of the laws is there some big picture laws there are new Innovations or like profound things like uh all Roman citizens are equal before the law kind of founding fathers type of in in the United States in the Western World these big legal ideas I think maybe one of the things that was really stressed in Roman law early on even as early as the 12 tables is the notion of Roman citizenship so if you were a Roman citizen it came with a set of um both priv es and obligations so the obligations were you're supposed to fight in the Army you were supposed to vote in elections the Privileges were you had the protection of Roman law and at least in theory if not in practice everybody was equal under that law now of course keep in mind we're talking about men here and even at the height of the Roman Empire let's say 2 Century ad there were about 50 million human beings living within the boundaries of the Roman Empire Maybe six million were actual citizens so you know this is we tend to go oh it's so great if you're a CIS and you have all these things well adult free men who are not slaves who are not resident foreigners they have this great stuff and that's always a tiny minority of all the human beings who existed in this Society but still the notion the notion of citizenship is huge and citizens for example early on you had to be tried at Rome if you accused of something um and there's this very famous moment uh in Sicily where an abusive governor who's corrupt uh is is uh punishing a citizen arbitrarily and this person Cries Out kis romanum meaning I am a Roman citizen and it really was this hugely loaded statement that that gives me protections it is wrong for you to do this to me it's wrong for you to beat me because I am a citizen and that gives me certain protections so that notion of citizenship is something that I think uh the Romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a lot of civilizations today where citizenship means something it's it's a special status