Building contracts in classical Roman law

This is a study of the development of one area of contract law during the classical period of Roman jurisprudence (50 B.C.-250 A.D.). Construction contracts are defined as an agreement between two individuals whereby one agrees to build a specified structure on the property of the other. Evidence for these contracts survives from Roman Italy primarily in juristic sources in the Digest. These texts contain the Roman jurists' interpretation either of real cases submitted to them or of hypothetical cases. The actual cases themselves do not survive independently. Apart from these texts, there is some archaeological, epigraphical, and literary (non-legal) evidence in which allusions to construction contracts are preserved. The Digest sources indicate that, in Roman law, building contracts were formed by concluding one of two types of contracts: locatio conductio or stipulatio. I have grouped the sources according to specific problem areas, for example, delay by the contractor. In each chapter, I have traced the process of the jurists' law-making as opinions on each problem began to accumulate. Then I have examined this development from the perspective of the potential litigants, taking into account what each party could obtain from the law. Certain trends can be perceived. Increasingly the jurists tend to instruct the iudex (who actually tries the case) to judge the builder's performance after measuring his degree of expertise against a 'good faith' standard. This standard seems to involve comparing the work to the level of expertise generally required in the building trade. The jurists are willing to provide these kinds of guidelines for the judge, but they do not involve themselves in setting precise technical standards.