Bryn Mawr Classical Review reviews Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity by Caroline Humfress. The book seems to be a vindication of legal developments after the Constantinian revolution.
Caroline Humfess has made a truly important contribution to the study of the legal history of the later Roman Empire. Not only does she prove the vibrancy of late antique legal thought, too often characterized as vulgar or debased, she also demonstrates how vital forensic (i.e. courtroom) argumentation was to legislative innovation in this period. Although imperial constitutions do provide much of her evidence, Humfress gets around the tricky problem of evaluating enforcement by focusing instead on the issues or specific cases that provoked their formulation, assuming that “virtually all the general laws in the Theodosian and Justinianic Codes were prompted by a concrete case or…a concrete situation.” Humfress parts ways here with many fine historians, who see limited evidence for real-world impetus behind imperial legislation. Nevertheless, using religious legislation as her focus, she makes a very strong case for her unorthodox position, and she is able to demonstrate convincingly the contribution of forensic argumentation to the composition of law in the later Roman Empire. What is more, Humfress shows how churchmen, trained as advocates, contributed significantly to this process…