Dear students - Don't let the heat make you forget about registering for fall classes! Consider, for example, History 286, "Law Crime and Society in Ancient Rome" which can fit either the legal or premodern concentrations: The ancient Romans produced the first comprehensive and scientific system of law, a system of principles abstracted from mere rules that proved to be extraordinary successful and influential. In terms of comprehension, sophistication, and clarity, no other secular legal system can match it, and there are no modern legal systems that aren't in its debt. Because of this the study of Roman Law provides particularly trenchant insights into how law functions in all societies, including our own. The course is a basic introduction to ancient Roman Law covering a thousand year period, roughly from 450 BCE in the Roman Republic, to 565 CE at the beginning of the Byzantine Empire. The focus, however, is on a narrower period, roughly 100 BCE to 200 CE, what is known as the "classical" period of Roman Law. Positioning ourselves in this period we will look back and speculates about the origins and evolution of "classical" Roman law, and also forward to the late Roman Empire, the period when most of the surviving sources for Roman Law were written down. In regard to the law itself, it will be presented in the way it would have been taught to law students in the ancient world, two thousand years ago. In analyzing Roman Law we will adopt the broad Roman distinction between public (constitutional, international, and criminal) and private (civil) law. The analysis of civil law will follow the classic Roman legal categories: the Law of Persons (citizenship status, family, and slavery), the Law of Property (possession and ownership ), the Law of Obligations (contract and delict ), and the Law of Succession (inheritance), and in this order. Throughout the course the changing economic, social, and political contexts in which Roman law arose and developed will be emphasized, and we will determine whose needs and interests the law served. We will discuss the relationship of law to power, and to ethics. At the very end of the course we will consider the uses and developments of Roman Law after antiquity, the so-called "Second Life of Roman Law," from the Renaissance to the period of emerging postcolonial nations in the 1960s, as well as some of the ways that Roman Law has shaped modern legal systems in this country and abroad. ----- Katherine Pickering Antonova, Associate Professor of History, Queens College, CUNY http://www.kpantonova.com/