Legal pluralism in the Roman Empire. A case study

Abstract Years ago, John Griffiths introduced the concept of ‘legal pluralism’ in comparative legal research. He underlined the significance of ‘the presence in a social field of more than one legal order’ (1986). In the meantime, the phenomenon of legal pluralism and the pluralism of norms is widely discussed in modern societies. Decades later, Dupret seeks to sum up the development of research and ideas about the plurality of legal and social norms in our time (2007). In this paper I look at sources from the ancient world. I raise the question whether the phenomenon of legal pluralism and the plurality of social norms already existed in the Roman Empire. Traditionally, Roman law is considered as a systematized, and sophisticated system of rules. Approaching the topic from the aspect of everyday practice, one gets a different picture. A closer look at concrete legal disputes and at the reaction of leading lawyers of Rome to problems of citizens who lived in the provinces convince us of the co-existence of different legal conceptions in the Empire.