The Future's Past: Fiction, Biography, and Status in Roman Law

Abstract

The article considers and contrasts two ways in which Roman law understood the lives of its subjects. Roman formulary procedure allowed litigants to tell their stories, but ultimately required judges to abstract certain facts as salient to the issue at hand. This process reflected the legal system's desire to analyze situations in terms of rules and their violation. By contrast, much legal reasoning about individuals involved the use of fictions. These imagined life histories for individuals stretching into both past and future. In particular, the article shows that normative conceptions of the pattern of lives required that legal outcomes, which shaped the future, be justified by fictions that rewrote the past, to bring it into alignment with the future that legal decisions were creating.