The modern history of the image of the Roman Praetor is an interesting one.1 A possible beginning to this story is the transformation of the image of the Roman Praetor from the 18th to the 19th century: To classical Enlightenment authors like Charles Montesquieu (16891755) and Edward Gibbon (1737- 1794) the Roman Praetor acted contrary to republican ideals.2To leading German legal Romanists of the 18th century, living in absolute regimes, the Praetor was a corrupt politician obtaining by underhand means unjustified legislative functions.3 However, already during the first decades of the 19th century such critical views disappeared, and very soon the praetorian way of dealing with law was understood as a model for law-making. There were legal, political and cultural reasons for this change.Among the legal cultural ones were the well known impulses of the German new humanism and the connected revival of Roman law.4Around1814 the German debate about the qualities of Roman law tended to be won by those acknowledging its supreme qualities, although they were confronted by the well known counter arguments by leading lawyers like A. F. J.Thibaut (1772-1840) or P. J.A. Feuerbach (1775-1833).5 Normatively, it was now the task of the legal science to use Roman law as re cht swi s s e n scha f t al s j ur i st i sch e dok t r i n 180 1 The following text has only an indirect connection to what we may call the historical Roman Praetor. Given the rudimentary historical sources there are of course ample possibilities for a variety of historical interpretations of that figure (or more precisely, those figures).This historical Roman Praetor, as interpreted by presentday legal historians does however not concern me in this essay.The issue of the 19th century visions of Roman Praetor must be seen as part of what I call 19th century ideologies of Roman law. See Michalsen,“Ideologies of Roman Law in Norwegian and English Legal Science in19th Century” in: Quaderni Fiorentini (2006) pp. 225253 and the monograph in Norwegian, Michalsen, Romerrettsideologi (Oslo 2008). 2 Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois (1748) XI,16-18; Gibbon,History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireVol IV (1788) Ch. 44[on Roman law]. See in general social and cultural terms about this transformation e.g.MartinThom,Republics,Nations and Tribes (London 1995). 3 See e.g. Heineccius, Academische Reden (Frankfurt a. M. 1758) § 64 pp. 63 sq. who speaks about the „List“ of the Praetors. 4 See still FranzWieacker, Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit (2.Ausg. Göttingen 1967) Ch. 20 and James Q.Whitman, The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era (Princeton 1990) pp. 66 sq. 5 Among many examples see A. F. J.Thibaut, Ueber die Nothwendigkeit eines allgemeinen bürgerlichen Rechts für Deutschland. Nachträge 2.Ausgabe (1814) in: Hattenhauer, Thibaut und Savigny. Ihre programmatischen Schriften (München1973) eg. p.194. P. J. A. Feuerbach, Einige Worte über historische Rechtsgelehrtsamkeit und ein-
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