of law, and on the other, applied in legal proceedings.23 During this period, natural law started to take shape as a system of law, which was held to bind men on account of its intrinsic truth value and correspondence with the reason of Nature.24 It is due to such intrinsic characteristics that natural law provides various national systems of law and legislation with superior norms lending national law and legislation objective, extra-legal validation and legitimacy.25 It is this specific understanding of the normative priority of natural law in relation to national law that eventually becomes a fundamental trait of the Christian notion of natural law that developed during the Middle Ages and in early modern times.26 In theory, the definitions of Cicero et al. that true law, as norms emanating from the reason of Nature, made up the foundation of legal theory of the Roman Empire. In practice:“… the habitual attitude of the Roman lawyers is different: ius naturale is an ideal to which it is desirable that law should conform, but it [ius naturale] was not really at any time, for them, a test of the validity of a rule of law.”27 For instance, the lax attitude of the Romans vis-à-vis the binding power of natural law is illustrated by their attitude towards the institution of slavery, an institution contradicting natural reason, hence rendering it fundamentally invalid, while Roman law, ius civile, as well as the law of the civilized nations, ius gentium, acknowledged and accorded legal protection to the rationally illicit institution of slavery.28 Using slavery as an example, its enormous economic importance in Roman society a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 569 23 Verdross, Abendl. Rechtsph., p. 46; Schlosser, Grundzüge, pp. 76-77; Morrison, Jurisprudence: from the Greeks to Post-modernism, p. 54. 24 Welzel, Naturrecht, p. 40. 25 Cf.Verdross, Abendl. Rechtsph., pp. 46-47. 26 Welzel, Naturrecht, pp. 54-55; Schlosser, Grundzüge, pp. 79-80. 27 Buckland, Roman Private Law, p. 29. For a short account of the 20th Century discussion regarding the status of ius naturale in Roman law see also Schiller, Roman Law: Mechanisms of Development, pp. 556-560. 28 Buckland,Roman Private Law, p.29;The Roman Law of Slavery:The Condition of the Slave in Private Law fromAugustus to Justinian, p.1. See alsoWieacker,Römische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 366.
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