Definitio

The definition is an important tool for legal thinking and argumentation. The DEFINITIO project aims to carry out a critical reading of the texts of the Digest to find all the definitions it contains. To this end, it starts from novel and broader premises than those adopted to date in other research into what a definition is and how to identify it. We seek to move away from a restrictive concept of definition, alien to the Roman sources themselves, which identified many and varied modalities. Similarly, we aim to identify a plurality of linguistic markers in Latin which can introduce a definition and which have not been taken into account to date. These starting points allow us to work on the hypothesis that there is a large number of definitions hidden in the Digest, which challenges the opinion that the Roman jurists defined little and with little scientific quality. Confirmation of our starting hypothesis will therefore require a reassessment of the importance of definition in the thinking of Roman jurists, which will require an in-depth examination of the role of definitions in the development of their reasoning, also in relation to their historical context, in order to understand their typology, means and ends. This in-depth understanding of the role of the definition in the works of the jurists also requires a double approach: on the one hand, it is necessary to read the text in the context of its original work; on the other hand, it is also important to consider the role that the definition played in the general structure of the Justinian Digest, as well as in the structure of each particular title. To achieve this, we will enter all the information obtained from our critical reading of the Digest into a database that we will make available to the entire scientific community at the end of the project. The information will be distributed in several fields: jurist, book, title and fragment of the Digest, text of the definition, context in the original work (context in Lenel´s Palingenesia), linguistic marker used, the jurist's purpose in using it, the typology according to the way of defining, etc. This information will be provided in a way that allows semantic searches with filters so that it can be useful to any researcher of the Ancient World. Apart from this, once the information has been collected in the database, we will apply computer tools of statistical analysis that will allow us to draw conclusions and establish relationships hitherto unappreciated with regard to the elaboration of definitions by jurists. To achieve these objectives, we have assembled a team of highly qualified researchers, specialists in various branches of Roman law (since we cannot fully understand the function of the definition without understanding the legal problem behind it), and a working team comprising, among others, several young researchers for the highly formative nature of the project, and a database expert to take charge of the technical part of the project. Finally, our project, which is of a historical-legal nature, is also expected to be useful for understanding and solving current legal problems related to definitions, and it is hoped that it can also contribute to improving normative technique regarding the use of definitions.