L’invention du droit en Occident. Une lecture d’Aldo Schiavone

• Main Author: Thibaud Lanfranchi
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2014-11-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: disciplinamento; Ius; Roman law; Scaevola (Q. Mucius)
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/6080

This book review focuses on Aldo Schiavone’s Ius. L’invenzione del diritto in Occidente. It considers, at first, the French translation of the book and the problems raised by the notion of disciplinamento, which is essential in the author’s view, and which is badly translated. In a second time, the review presents the evolution of the law in Rome, as conceived by Schiavone. According to him, ius is a stabilizing answer, which allowed to discipline a society and to help it to endure in a hostile environment. The history of the ius then appears as the progressive isolation of an autonomous legal function in the Roman society, in particular through the shift towards the abstraction that occurred at the turning point between Republic and Empire. That shift in a legal formalism definitely isolated the ius in an independent legal sphere, which constitutes Rome’s most important legacy to the West.