The Main Institutions of Roman Private Law

by William Warwick Buckland

This 1931 book was written to replace The Elementary Principles of Roman Law, but it is not a second edition of that book. It is more systematic in it aims at giving a central view of the different institutions of the Private Law and of the notions which underlie them. But its purpose is the its is for the use of students who have read the Institutes and little more, and it is intended to stimulate rather than to inform. It will still be of interest today.

410 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2011

About the author

William Warwick Buckland, M.A., LL.D. (1859-1946) was a scholar of Roman law, Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge from 1914 to 1945.

William Warwick Buckland was educated in France, at Hurstpierpoint College and the Crystal Palace School of Engineering. He entered Caius College, Cambridge, in 1881, graduating in 1884 with a first in the Law Tripos. Elected a Fellow of Caius, he remained a Cambridge academic for the remainder of his life. In 1920 he became a Fellow of the British Academy. He received honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh (1922), Harvard (1929), Lyon, Louvain and Paris. Among his best-known works on Roman Law is A Textbook of Roman Law from Augustus to Justinian, which became a standard text.