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In this impressive, well-documented monograph the author explores the effect of legal practice, especially argument in court, on the Roman law of late antiquity, notably the law of heresy and the emerging canon law of the Christian Churches. The book comes in three parts. In the first the author explores the role of forensic practitioners (judges, legal experts and advocates, the first and last of which were often not legally trained) in the development of late Roman law. In the second she focuses on those forensic practitioners who used their expertise to further the interests of the late antique Church either in relation to the courts and civil law or in regard to early canon law. The final part deals with the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, particularly in relation to the courts. Humfress makes good use of ecclesiastical writers and theologians as well as of the more obvious legal and literary sources.
In Humfress's view not only was there, as a number of authors have argued, more continuity between pre-Christian law and the law of the later empire, as seen by lawyers and the imperial bureaucracy, than used to be supposed but the practice of forensic advocacy continued much as before. It was embraced by many educated Christians. Indeed the cognitio system of procedure 'actually increased the opportunities for advocates and iurisperiti to influence the development of the law on a case-by-case basis through their activities in court' (p. 28). In the later empire the...