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Tessa G Leesen, GAIUS MEETS CICERO: LAW AND RHETORIC IN THE SCHOOL CONTROVERSIES Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (www.brill.nl), Legal History Library vol 2, 2010. xiv + 357 pp. ISBN 9789004187740. € 99.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.3366/elr.2012.0087
Date01 January 2012
Pages122-124
AuthorAnna Plisecka
Published date01 January 2012

Tessa Leesen has dedicated her book, Gaius meets Cicero: Law and Rhetoric in the School Controversies, to one of the most entrancing and most studied topics of Roman law, namely the legal debate between the sectae of the Sabinians and the Proculians. The two opposing schools active at the beginning of the Principate disagreed on many points of private law regarding contracts, inheritance, property and the family. There have been numerous attempts to explain the origins of these debates, but now Leesen has found scope for a new interpretation of the riddle.

The most concise report of the school controversies is given by a late disciple of the Sabinian school, Gaius, in his Institutes written around 160 AD. Leesen has decided to base her argumentation exclusively on the controversies reported in this work (41-42). It is worth remarking that this does limit her treatment somewhat, since the school debates which feature only in Justinian's Digest (eg, on the legacy of quota D.30.26.2; on the acquisition of the res derelicta D.41.7.2.1 and D.47.2.43.5; on the acquisition of treasure D.41.2.3.3 and on the ferruminatio D.41.1.27.2) or in the Vaticana Fragmenta (on the exceptio ex lege Cincia by undue payment V.F.266) are for this reason missing from her analysis.

Legal dispute was the main feature of Roman jurists’ law from the republican times until the late Empire, yet the appearance in the early Principate of the two schools was the culmination of the ius controversum. The dissent between the Sabinians and the Proculians has for a long time inspired legal historians. Some have built theories explaining Roman law entirely from the perspective of the school controversies, while some have tried to interpret as school controversies debates which had no clear reference to the famous sectae. Nevertheless, in the more recent literature it has come to be widely acknowledged that the controversies constitute a general characteristic of the jurists’ law and arose independently of the existence of schools and the orientation of the jurists to the opposing sectae.

The book's structure is very clear. In the introduction (1-45) Leesen presents two “keys” for the interpretation of the dissension between the schools: the first is based on the link between the controversies and the practice of issuing responsa, while the second consists in individualising rhetoric, and specifically the topoi, as the methodological tool for finding arguments. In the following twenty-one...

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