FOREWORD

A colleague once told me that, even after long years teaching Roman law, he still reads Nicholas’s Introduction with profit.

Other veterans would say the same. This can hardly be true of many introductory textbooks in law, and those other magic books, if they exist, would never serve both students and scholars so wonderfully as Nicholas’s Introduction does. It is above all a very thoughtful book. The typical Roman law textbook of a generation earlier was efficient in communicating the rules, but lacked the patience to explain the things that puzzle students the most: Why this rule and not another? What problem is this rule trying to solve? Why did the jurists not grasp what is so obvious to us? and so on. Knowledge of the rules is never enough; students learn to make the noises of a civilian lawyer with none of his understanding. We easily forget how much this book rejects that older style, but we can see it and feel it in the pace of the discussion. Nicholas noticeably slows down and speeds up. He slows down to linger over the difficult subjects like possession, where a bad beginning would ruin a person’s understanding of almost everything that follows. He slows down to describe the modern law, showing the staying power of ideas that happen to be very good, or admitting the shortcomings of ideas that got the burial they deserved. He speeds up when the subject turns to rules and institutions that sit dumbly without telling us anything interesting about the Romans or their law. Throughout the book he includes facts about Roman social life, without which the Roman actors would seem to us to be performing some mysterious dance.

One of this book’s qualities is perhaps noticeable only to persons who have taught Roman law for some time.

Nicholas clearly knew the minds of his stu dents and was attentive to their mistakes and anxieties. But he did not respond as most of us would: by explaining the law in more detail. Instead he used their mistakes and anxieties to think more deeply about the subject, and to find if he could some quiet aspect of the law which few bothered to express but which, when expressed, dispatched the problem suddenly and completely. So for example, to the student who reads that ‘possession is a fact’ and thinks there is nothing more to know, Nicholas says

There is... a danger of being bemused by words unless one inquires first what the Romans meant by possession as a fact. And one should perhaps begin with what they did not mean.... [Possession was not a fact if by that one means that it was unregulated by law.

To the student who sees only pedantry in the distinction between a contract and a conveyance, Nicholas says

This separation of contract and conveyance is rooted in the sound though inarticulate principle that rights in rem, since they potentially affect everyone, should not be secretly created or transferred, whereas there is no such objection to the secret creation of rights in personam.

To the student who studies unjust enrichment and wonders what the fuss is about, Nicholas says

The hostility which the principle fof unjust enrichment] arouses and the difficulties which it encounters derive from the fact that it claims to correct the law by an appeal to justice.

These are the flashes of timely advice by a teacher who has listened to his students, and now corrects the misstep before the foot has landed.

This new edition of An Introduction to Roman Raw is happily not very new. The book is a classic. Accordingly Nicholas’s text is unchanged and only the fringes of the book amended and enlarged by a glossary, a bibliography, and these inadequate words of praise.

ERNEST METZGER

Glasgow,.May 2008

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Source: Nicholas Barry, Metzger Ernest. An Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press,1976. — 317 p.. 1976

FOREWORD

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