The Handbook is intended to survey the landscape of contemporary research and chart principal directions of future inquiry. Its aim is to bring to bear upon Roman legal study the full range of intellectual resources of contemporary legal history, from comparison to popular constitutionalism, from international private law to law and society. This unique contribution of the volume sets it apart from others in the field.

Furthermore, the volume brings the study of Roman law into closer alignment, and thus into dialogue, with historical, sociological, and anthropological research in law in other periods. The volume is therefore directed not simply to ancient historians and legal historians already focused on the ancient world, but to historians of all periods interested in law and its complex and multifaceted relationship to society.

Clifford Ando is a historian of government, law, and religion specializing in the ancient Mediterranean between the late Hellenistic and late Roman periods. He has particular interests in contemporary social and political theory, public law, practices of legal interpretation, and metaphor and cognition.

Paul du Plessis is a legal historian whose research interests include Roman law, medieval interpretations of Roman law, Roman-Dutch law, the historical development of the civilian tradition in mixed jurisdictions, the relationship between law and history as well as between law and society in a historical context. He is a member of various organizations dedicated to the study of legal history, sometime webmaster of the Center for Legal History at Edinburgh University and convener of the Edinburgh Roman Law Group. He is co-author of the Edinburgh Legal History Blog. He is the general editor, with Thomas McGinn, of the monograph series Oxford Studies in Roman Society and Law.

Dr. Kaius Tuori is currently an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. His research interests include legal history, Roman law, legal anthropology, classical archaeology, and their intellectual history. In addition to four books, his work has been published in Law, Culture and the Humanities, The Journal of Legal History, the Journal of Legal Pluralism, Revue internationale des droits de l'Antiquite and the Legal History Review. He holds a doctorate in Law and a M.A. in History from his studies at the universities of Helsinki, Finland, and La Sapienza in Rome, Italy.