Law and Justice - Roman Law and Human Rights - 14.

5 Slavery and Status

Janux
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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
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Dr. Kyle Harper is Associate Professor of Classics and Letters,
Video by NextThought (http://nextthought.com).
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