(Legal) Production of Space: Towards a Roman Legal Geography

This presentation will discuss the on-going project of the book "Land, Law, and Space in North Africa in the Roman Period: Towards a Roman Legal Geography" and the possible further development and application of the models presented in it. The book itself aims at proposing a new methodological framework for the study of the ancient world, defined here as “Roman Legal Geography”, and its primary objective is to bridge the gap between the highly specialized legal dogmatics of the continental tradition and the broader interdisciplinary inquiries of fields such as spatial studies. Such an approach is intended to be complementary to the broadly intended Roman social history adding a further analytical dimension to the study of the Roman world. Bearing on this and in light of recent studies, the second part of the presentation will explore if and how the notion of ‘legal production of space’ in particular could be used for different periods of the Roman Empire and with regards to different phenomena.