A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest
Traditional philological methods in Roman legal scholarship such as close reading and strict juristic reasoning have analysed law in extraordinary detail. Such methods, however, have paid less attention to the empirical characteristics of legal texts and occasionally projected an abstract framework...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2020-10-01
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| Series: | Informatics |
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| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/7/4/44 |
| _version_ | 1797550932061323264 |
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| author | Marton Ribary Barbara McGillivray |
| author_facet | Marton Ribary Barbara McGillivray |
| author_sort | Marton Ribary |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Traditional philological methods in Roman legal scholarship such as close reading and strict juristic reasoning have analysed law in extraordinary detail. Such methods, however, have paid less attention to the empirical characteristics of legal texts and occasionally projected an abstract framework onto the sources. The paper presents a series of computer-assisted methods to open new frontiers of inquiry. Using a Python coding environment, we have built a relational database of the Latin text of the <i>Digest</i>, a historical sourcebook of Roman law compiled under the order of Emperor Justinian in 533 CE. Subsequently, we investigated the structure of Roman law by automatically clustering the sections of the <i>Digest</i> according to their linguistic profile. Finally, we explored the characteristics of Roman legal language according to the principles and methods of computational distributional semantics. Our research has discovered an empirical structure of Roman law which arises from the sources themselves and complements the dominant scholarly assumption that Roman law rests on abstract structures. By building and comparing Latin word embeddings models, we were also able to detect a semantic split in words with general and legal sense. These investigations point to a practical focus in Roman law which is consistent with the view that ancient law schools were more interested in training lawyers for practice rather than in philosophical neatness. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-10T15:36:27Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-66148921e5e44d32bb7e206e2a9d1505 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2227-9709 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-10T15:36:27Z |
| publishDate | 2020-10-01 |
| publisher | MDPI AG |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Informatics |
| spelling | doaj.art-66148921e5e44d32bb7e206e2a9d15052023-11-20T17:10:57ZengMDPI AGInformatics2227-97092020-10-01744410.3390/informatics7040044A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s DigestMarton Ribary0Barbara McGillivray1School of Law, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UKTheoretical and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DA, UKTraditional philological methods in Roman legal scholarship such as close reading and strict juristic reasoning have analysed law in extraordinary detail. Such methods, however, have paid less attention to the empirical characteristics of legal texts and occasionally projected an abstract framework onto the sources. The paper presents a series of computer-assisted methods to open new frontiers of inquiry. Using a Python coding environment, we have built a relational database of the Latin text of the <i>Digest</i>, a historical sourcebook of Roman law compiled under the order of Emperor Justinian in 533 CE. Subsequently, we investigated the structure of Roman law by automatically clustering the sections of the <i>Digest</i> according to their linguistic profile. Finally, we explored the characteristics of Roman legal language according to the principles and methods of computational distributional semantics. Our research has discovered an empirical structure of Roman law which arises from the sources themselves and complements the dominant scholarly assumption that Roman law rests on abstract structures. By building and comparing Latin word embeddings models, we were also able to detect a semantic split in words with general and legal sense. These investigations point to a practical focus in Roman law which is consistent with the view that ancient law schools were more interested in training lawyers for practice rather than in philosophical neatness.https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/7/4/44Roman lawDigestcomputational linguisticscorpus linguisticsclusteringdistributional semantics |
| spellingShingle | Marton Ribary Barbara McGillivray A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest Informatics Roman law Digest computational linguistics corpus linguistics clustering distributional semantics |
| title | A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest |
| title_full | A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest |
| title_fullStr | A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest |
| title_full_unstemmed | A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest |
| title_short | A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest |
| title_sort | corpus approach to roman law based on justinian s digest |
| topic | Roman law Digest computational linguistics corpus linguistics clustering distributional semantics |
| url | https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/7/4/44 |
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