Security and Credit in Roman Law: The Historical Evolution of Pignus and Hypotheca

There are no legal institutions other than pignus and hypotheca (i.e. mortgage) where the formative effect of legal practice can be so clearly observed. Security and Credit in Roman Law outlines the legal history of these institutions in terms of an iterative relationship between transactional lawyers drafting legal transactions and Roman jurisprudence deploying its analytical skills in order to accommodate new transactional practices intothe Roman legal system. The evolution of the Roman law of real security, well known through the legal sources (Justinian's Digest and Code), is reconstructed, while matching it with actual banking practices, in particular the secured lending transactions documented in the archive of the Sulpicii. In the late classical periodthe imperial chancery increasingly interfered with it in order to provide a considerable degree of protection to debtors. The (largely but certainly not completely) spontaneous evolution of Roman law produced a law of...