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18 Roman Legal Trad. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/rltrad18 and id is 1 raw text is: Managing Crises by Way of Ritualization and Exception in Roman Testamentary Succession Law Constantin Willems* Abstract - In principle, a Roman citizen could make a will only when observing a set of strictly ritualized testamentary formalities. However, in times of crises, sticking to time consuming and labor intensive rituals entails high transaction costs, while at the same time the threats experienced as a consequence of the crisis at hand increase the individual need to stipulate one's last will. In this paper, it will be argued that throughout the centuries, from archaic times to late antiquity, Roman testamentary succession law looked for a compromise between ritualization and exception, thus managing crises in an effective way. I. Preliminary remarks Stipulating one's last will under Roman law was a highly formal- ized affair.' However, before addressing the different steps in the development of testamentary formalities2 as forms of ritualized ways to pass on one's assets on death, it must be remembered that is does not go without saying that a person is free to choose the fate of his or her patrimony after his or her death and that thereby the . The author is Professor of Roman Law and Civil Law at the University of Marburg, Germany. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a workshop on Crisis Management: Ritualization and States of Exception in Ancient Cultures, hosted by Susanne Godde and Reinhard Bernbeck at Freie Universitat Berlin on November 13, 2020. Helpful remarks have been made by Reinhard Bernbeck, Mark Geller, Susanne Godde, Marietta Horster and Cosima M6ller in the subsequent discussion and by the anonymous reviewer for and editor of Roman Legal Tradition. 1 See D. Johnston, Roman Law in Context (Cambridge 1999), 45. 2 For an overview see P. du Plessis, Borkowski's Textbook on Roman law, 6th ed. (Oxford 2020), 221-24; for details, see T. Rfifner, Testament- ary Formalities in Roman Law, in K. G. C. Reid, M. J. de Waal, and R. Zimmermann, eds., Testamentary Formalities (Oxford 2011), 1-26. Roman Legal Tradition, 18 (2022), 1-22. ISSN 1943-6483. Published by the Ames Foundation at the Harvard Law School and the Alan Rodger Endowment at the University of Glasgow. This work is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0. Copyright @ 2022 by Constantin Willems. romanlegaltradition.org. DOI 10.55740/2022.1

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