Roman Legal Tradition

The Ames Foundation is pleased to announce the publication of William Warwick Buckland’s Lectures on the Roman Law of Actions, edited by Ernest Metzger, Douglas Professor of Civil Law, University of Glasgow.

Roman Legal Tradition (RLT) is an online, peer-reviewed journal, the first volume of which was published in 2002 by the Roman Law Society of America under the auspices of the University of Kansas in order to make up for the absence of an English-language journal devoted to Roman law and its long aftermath down to the present day. Two more such volumes followed in 2004 and 2006. In 2008, the journal moved to the University of Glasgow under the general editorship of Professor Metzger. Annual volumes have followed since then, and the contents of volume 21 for 2026 are now being filled. Also in 2008, the Foundation became the co-publisher of RLT along with the University of Glasgow. Over the years the Foundation has given RLT some financial support.

In 2010 and 2012, RLT published two volumes in a monograph series under the imprint Traditio Iuris Romani. Ames was not involved in these publications, other than as the co-publisher of RLT. Paperback copies are available at a modest cost through Amazon (2010, 2012). The 2010 volume is not available online; the 2012 volume is available through archive.org on a view-only basis. Recently, Professor Metzger conceived the idea of converting the Traditio Iuris Romani imprint to one on Historical Lectures in Legal History, publishing the unpublished lectures of distinguished British Romanists of the past. He began with the unpublished Cambridge lectures of W. W. Buckland, given probably in 1937, on actions in classical Roman law. (Interestingly, in 1922, the Harvard law School awarded Buckland the James Barr Ames Prize for his Text-Book of Roman Law [Boston Globe, Nov. 2, 1922].) Metzger’s Buckland volume is now available in PDF format on this site. A paperback hard copy may be purchased from Amazon for the modest price of US$4.95. Posting of the PDF on HeinOnline is planned.

This material is made available under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Any other use requires the permission of the Ames Foundation and Professor Metzger.