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A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest ...
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Abstract:
Traditional philological methods in Roman legal scholarship such as close reading and strict juristic reasoning have analysed law in extraordinary detail. Such methods, however, have paid less attention to the empirical characteristics of legal texts and occasionally projected an abstract framework onto the sources. The paper presents a series of computer-assisted methods to open new frontiers of inquiry. Using a Python coding environment, we have built a relational database of the Latin text of the Digest, a historical sourcebook of Roman law compiled under the order of Emperor Justinian in 533 CE. Subsequently, we investigated the structure of Roman law by automatically clustering the sections of the Digest according to their linguistic profile. Finally, we explored the characteristics of Roman legal language according to the principles and methods of computational distributional semantics. Our research has discovered an empirical structure of Roman law which arises from the sources themselves and ...
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Keyword:
clustering; computational linguistics; corpus linguistics; Digest; distributional semantics; Latin; LatinISE; Python; Roman law; word embeddings
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URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/311633
https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.58723
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