McKnight, Elizabeth Sarah; (2018) Ideas of the Rule of Law in Ancient Rome - from Republic to Empire. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

Cicero, Livy and the younger Pliny all claimed that the Roman republic, or the Trajanic principate, offered citizens a freedom that depended on governance according to the law. But did they contemplate that the Roman legal system conformed to the rule of law as it is now understood? Chapter I outlines a model of the rule of law advanced by Lon Fuller and briefly considers certain features of the legal system of the late Roman republic by reference to this model. Chapters II to IV examine in more detail Cicero's conception of the Roman legal system; Livy's treatment of the evolution of the republic as a society subject to the commands of the laws; and (more briefly) the younger Seneca's proposal to Nero of an alternative model of governance of Roman society, and Pliny's claims that Trajan had restored the rule of law by, in some sense, subjecting himself to the laws. By comparing their presentations of Rome's legal system with Fuller's model, the thesis draws out distinctive aspects of each author's ideas; it concludes that Cicero, Livy and Pliny all identified and valued features of the Roman legal system contemplated by Fuller's model to be central to the rule of law, but each author emphasised different aspects of the law as central to its effectiveness. Seneca provides an informative contrast. In exploring these matters, the thesis examines the treatment of the law in different literary genres; the relationship between legal reasoning, on the one hand, and rhetoric and philosophy, on the other; the role of examples in legal reasoning; and the authors' exploration of extra-legal grounds for commitment to the rule of law.

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