A Relational Database of Roman Law Based on Justinian’s <i>Digest</i>

Abstract

The data was produced as part of a three-year research project on the topic of "Computational modelling of law -Sustainable legal AI from Roman legal sources" conducted at the University of Surrey School of Law since November 2019. The project aims to create a computational model in the laboratory conditions of a historical legal system based on Justinian's corpus of Roman law (533-535 CE) and focuses on three cascading layers: (1) the compositional and conceptual structure of legal texts; (2) the network of legal concepts and axioms; and (3) the logic of legal rules. Developed functionalities will be adapted to address challenges of modern law and legal technology. The relational database of the Digest is the result of investigations at the first layer.(2) Methods Information was pulled from three types of sources: (1) the text of the Digest, (2) research papers reconstructing the Digest's compositional structure, and (3) encyclopaedia and dictionary articles, and other sources about the jurists quoted in the Digest.

A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian’s Digest

“…Apart from substantive insights about the structure and vocabulary of Roman law, our research has potentially far-reaching methodological contributions. The SQLite relational database of the Digest [12] is a valuable resource in its own right, well beyond the scope of this study. It makes it possible for scholars to make structured queries and run large-scale statistical analyses on the corpus.…”

“…It includes the Digest corpus in 50 books, 432 thematic sections, 9132 passages and 21,055 text units, totalling 803,465 word tokens. The core database tables We have recently reported the first release of an SQLite relational database of Roman law based on Justinian's Digest [12]. While the Digest text in this initial release may have some typographical errors inherited from ROMTEXT, the relational database approach guarantees that information retrieval and structured quantitative analysis carried out by SQL queries provide comprehensive and fully reliable results.…”

“…The database enables to date individual passages and text units by linking them to entries in the supplementary "jurist" table which gives the estimated date of the Digest's 37 jurists based on biographies in reference works [35][36][37]. The reuse potential of the database is discussed in detail in a dedicated data paper [12]. Our purpose was to provide a solid foundation for large scale quantitative analyses of the Digest corpus such as the one demonstrated in this paper.…”

“…The revolutionary ROMTEXT was originally produced on punch cards in the 1970s, which were subsequently converted to a command line format in DOS [11]. We have produced a relational database from ROMTEXT [12], which can be seen as the natural next step in philological efforts spanning more than a millennium.…”

Deep Impact: A Study on the Impact of Data Papers and Datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences

“…The third layer of the pyramid is the data paper [11] which points to and describes the data published in the public repository. The data paper directs attention to the resource and emphasises its reuse potential.…”