Roman civil law (ius civile) historically maintained that individuals subject to paternal power (patria potestas)—including enslaved persons and dependent sons—could acquire property solely on behalf of their household head (paterfamilias) while lacking any autonomous legal capacity to bind that head contractually to third parties. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legal formalists cited this doctrinal rigidity to argue that classical Roman commerce was structurally crippled by the absence of direct representation and corporate entity shielding. Under this orthodox view, the conceptual inability of Roman jurisprudence to recognize independent legal personality outside the physical citizen-patriarch severely constrained the scope and sophistication of Mediterranean enterprise.
However, revisionist legal historians have challenged this formalist assessment by illuminating the dynamic interplay between statutory civil law and praetorian equity (ius honorarium). Beginning in the late Republic, Roman praetors introduced a specialized suite of procedural remedies termed actiones adiecticiae qualitatis (actions with added liability). Rather than overturning the archaic civil dogma of personal incapacity, praetorian edicts pragmatically bypassed it. By granting third-party creditors direct procedural recourse against the master up to defined thresholds, these actions accommodated commercial reality without formally altering the underlying civil codes. Most notably, when an enterprise was capitalized through a peculium—a segregated fund entrusted by a principal to an enslaved business agent (institor)—the actio de peculio limited the master's contractual exposure strictly to the value of that designated commercial fund.
This praetorian framework effectively generated a functional regime of asset partitioning and limited liability. Roman principals could compartmentalize commercial risk across multiple maritime or retail ventures while insulating their primary familial patrimony from enterprise insolvency. Classical Roman jurisprudence thus managed commercial expansion not through the doctrinal invention of abstract corporate persons, but through procedural ingenuity that reconciled traditional patriarchal structures with the practical demands of large-scale mercantile agency.
Based on the passage above, what is the central thesis advanced by the author regarding classical Roman commercial law?
Cevap: Praetorian procedural remedies provided a functional equivalent of limited liability and commercial agency despite formal civil law restrictions. / Praetorian procedural innovations enabled sophisticated commercial agency and limited liability within the constraints of formal Roman civil law. / Roman legal practice achieved functional commercial representation and asset partitioning through praetorian remedies rather than formal corporate doctrine. / Praetorian remedies created functional limited liability and commercial agency without altering formal Roman civil law doctrines. / Classical Roman law accommodated commercial agency and limited liability through praetorian procedural flexibility rather than doctrinal corporate personality.