We will be closed from 5pm BST on Friday 28th August 2026 for the late summer bank holiday, re-opening at 8.30am BST on Tuesday 1st September. Any orders placed during this period will be processed when we re-open.
In this book, it is argued that twenty regulae in title D. 50.17 of Justinian’s Digest are not the legal rules that scholarly wisdom has long held them to be, but are instead rhetorical arguments. As arguments, these regulae do not comfortably fit the modern perception of Roman law as a system and sometimes even appear to have no connection with law whatsoever. By explaining them in the context of rhetoric, and of Cicero’s Topica especially, the authors identify and reconstruct the original tenor of these twenty regulae as well as that of the famous regula Catoniana, stating their case for a paradigm shift in the study of Roman law in the process.
