This Casebook introduces the area of Roman law governing the most personal and urgent problems that free Romans normally confronted: the marital relationship, the power of fathers over their children, and the devolution of property within the family. This area of law is interesting even today because, although many parts of it seem at least generally familiar, Roman family law was organized and developed on lines that are radically, and at times almost breathtakingly, different from any modern legal system. On one level, then, students are invited to think about a set of legal rules that are unlike anything they have ever seen before but that nonethe- less.
