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13 Roman Legal Trad. 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/rltrad13 and id is 1 raw text is: Review Ernest Metzger Cicero's Law: Rethinking Roman Law of the Late Republic. Edited by Paul J. du Plessis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2016. x + 241 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-0882-0. Modern Roman lawyers sometimes have difficulty talking about Cicero, unsure whether he'll be admitted to the conversation, or with what conditions. Dr. du Plessis's hope is to make the conver- sation better and Cicero more appreciated. For a time scholars gave most of their attention to system and legal doctrine, and they doubted Cicero's value as a source for, and about, the law. But their attention was too narrow, according to the argument of this book, because they avoided thinking about the wider effects of society on law. Dr. du Plessis suggests that a better focus than system and doctrine, and a field of inquiry in its own right, is legal culture: 'Roman legal culture' will be used to describe all those phenomena (including the economic) that can be related, whether directly or indirectly, to the workings of the law in the late Republic. This is an expansive definition which obviously admits Cicero, though how widely is the question the twelve essays in this book attempt to answer. The essays divide broadly into (I) those which cast light on law and legal sources, with the aid of Cicero, and (II) those which explain Cicero and his works. I. Olga Tellegen-Couperus and Jan Willem Tellegen (Reading a Dead Man's Mind: Hellenistic Philosophy, Rhetoric and Roman Law) take up voluntas testatoris and the reasoning employed by jurists to interpret it. We can presume to have knowledge of the testator's intentions only if those intentions are truly knowable, and that requires Stoic confidence in the power of reason. But the jurists, the authors argue, were not so confident as this. They did Roman Legal Tradition, 13 (2017), 1-4. 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 may be reproduced and distributed for all non-commercial purposes. Copyright © 2017 by Ernest Metzger. All rights reserved apart from those granted above. ROMANLEGALTRADITION.ORG

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