the Succession of the Jurists, contains one short text from Gaius and one long one from Pomponius. Both jurists had stopped writing by around A.D. So for Justinian, Roman legal history stopped then. No mention of the subsequent famous jurists, Papinian, Paul, Ulpian. Juristic writings were not brought up to date in the Digest. Better examples that the law was not modernized can scarcely be imagined. For historical reasons, connected with the political strife of the fifth century B.C., the jurists were concerned only with interpretation and, at that, only interpretation of private law. Thus, there is almost no discussion of public law in the Digest. The public law has two dimensions. First public law as it interacts with private law. Here we find another surprise. Astonishingly, only two Digest texts mention the market. First, D. ... tells us that the meat trade is under the control of the urban prefect so the supervision of the pig market is under his control. Second, D. ... which concerns hiding from one’s creditors records that the older jurists believed that a person who conducted business in the market was hiding if he lurked around pillars or stalls.45 But there are more surprises. In sharp contrast to American slave law, in the U.S.A. or in Latin America, there is almost no public dimension to Roman slave law; manumission is not restricted by the state, restriction of punishment of recalcitrant slaves (in the Code) is really not enforceable, education is an issue only for the owners, there are no rules for enforcing slave behavior, nothing about a system of rewards for returning runaways.46 45 See already Alan Watson, The Spirit of Roman Law(Athens, GA., 1995), pp. 49 ff. 46 See, e.g., Alan Watson, Roman Slave Law(Baltimore, 1987); Slave Law in the Americas(Athens, GA., 1989).
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