Selected Studies on Roman Law and Comparative History of Private Law

Nietzsche’s famous aphorism that the philologist’s task is everlasting if he wishes to better understand his own age through studying Antiquity, applies to scholars of Roman law as well. This volume offers a selection of András Földi’s essays – published in German, Italian, English and French – from the last three decades and hopes to convince the reader that the sources of Roman law can, in many cases, still serve as a compass for finding answers to the questions of our time, which is awashed with challenges.

Most of the writings in this volume deal with three major topics: bona fides, commercial institutions and liability for damages. These topics are discussed not only in their relation to ancient Roman law, but also with regard to the history of private law in medieval and modern times, with particular reference to a comparison with modern European legal systems. In addition, dedicated studies are devoted to the origin of the distinction between public and private law, to the development of Roman civil procedure law, to certain aspects of the legal status of slaves and offsprings of freedmen, and to the history of the concepts of ownership, of the validity of juridical acts and of responsibility.

The author updated the older studies, taking into account e.g. the new Hungarian Civil Code of 2013 and the reform of the French Code civil of 2016. Cross-references draw attention to the connections between individual studies, and an index of sources helps the readers to navigate the volume.

András Földi was born in Budapest in 1957. He obtained a law degree at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 1981. As a pupil of Róbert Brósz and Gábor Hamza, he devoted particular attention to Roman law already during his master’s course. He has been teaching Roman law at his alma mater since 1981. Thanks to a DAAD scholarship he has spent the academic year of 1988/89 at the Leopold Wenger Institute in Munich, where he was mentored by Dieter Nörr and Alfons Bürge. He also made several study visits to Italy, mainly to the La Sapienza University in Rome, where he was mentored by Feliciano Serrao. He has lectured some 40 times at international conferences as well as at universities abroad in German, Italian and English. He was invited by Laurens Winkel to be the keynote speaker at the SIHDA Congress in Rotterdam in 2001. In 2003 he became a full professor of Roman law at Eötvös Loránd University. In 2011 he also became a professor of comparative legal history. In 2022 he was awarded corresponding membership by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.