Legal Artifices: Ten Essays on Roman Law in the Present Tense

The first English-language anthology of Yan Thomas, whose contributions to Roman law revolutionised legal scholarship

Collects and translates 10 essays by Yan Thomas (1943–2008), the most renowned French jurist of the 20th century
Provides a juridical perspective on the genealogy of the Western subject and the elementary conditions for the exercise of power
Builds on the growing interest in Thomas’ work generated by recent engagements, such as in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series
Demonstrates the formal continuity of socio-legal techniques that have defined Western legal culture

Western legal professionals habitually rely on a version of legal history that bolsters their own sway over the present. The legal mythologies undergirding these self-serving proposals are divided between doctrines of law’s immemorial nature, and of its sacred (Roman) origins. Thomas’s de-mythicised jurisprudence, presented in this collection of essays, dismisses these sagas. His work sent seismic waves across the humanities and social sciences, with claims including:

Law is not a set of rules, but the operation of legal arguments; lawyers are the agents of the legal denaturalisation of the world
Rome is misread as an essentially political entity; the effect exercised on Roman society by its jurists ranks before that of its politicians
Despite a widely accepted opposition between modern labour law and the Roman renting-out of a slave’s workforce, there exist unexpected commonalities
‘Legal order’ and ‘responsibility’ are among the inventions of modern law; they are not part of the timeless inventory of the world