The Rise of the Indigenous Jurists

Numerous Roman grants to local communities of the right to use local law survive in contemporaneous copies starting in the second century BCE. Contemporaneous with these grants of autonomy, Rome urged institutional changes that reconstituted local elites as aristocracies of office. By contrast, evidence that individuals identified themselves as experts in local law survives in bulk only starting in the second century CE. The paper urges that the superimposition of Roman courts as courts of the second instance created a role in local polities for expertise in local law in mediation with these Roman courts, and that local elites sought to monopolize this role and the technocratic prestige that it brought.