REMARKS ON THE HISTORY OF TORT LAW
REMARKS ON THE HISTORY OF TORT LAW

Summary/Abstract: In any debate on tort law one has to be careful not to impose a modern understanding on ancient legal institutions. Modern legislations conceive a duality of concept and legal remedy between torts and crimes, while in ancient legislations we identify a conceptual unity, but a duality of legal treatment. We intend to underline this differentiation into distinct spheres during a long period of indistinction. We will have as a primary reference social changes, not the internal history of legal development. Our interest in the field of comparative law is towards the meaning of tort law, and secondary on the legal institution as we know it on Roman law textbooks. This methodological issue is imperative due to the fact that the scholar has to compensate for the scarcity of sources. Besides later texts, like Corpus juris civilis, we do not have something like a comprehensive and all-embracing image on Roman law, a full archive with laws, jurisprudence and doctrine, like nowadays, to guide us in interpretation and historical retrospective.

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