Research interests

  • Roman law

  • Roman legal history and culture

  • European legal history

  • Comparative law (in particular the law of property)

  • Roman law and rhetoric

  • Latin legal epigraphy

 

Prof. Daalder’s current research primarily concerns Roman law and Roman legal culture, with a particular focus on the imperial administration of justice (encompassing both legislation and adjudication), administrative law (especially the Roman fiscus), and legal writing. Her work can be situated in the larger ‘law and society’ approach, focusing on the way law, legal institutions, and legal writing affect society and vice versa. Current research projects include the rescripts of the emperor Caracalla, the historical development of the preliminary reference procedure (consultatio ante sententiam), and the oratio principis during the first three centuries CE

 

Conferences

  • Meeting of the young Dutch Legal Historians (2024)

  • Empire of Correspondence: Roman Imperial Letters as Literature and State Messaging - for more information, please see the call for abstracts

 

Ongoing projects

  • The oratio principis in the Principate

This project explores the orationes principis—the speeches delivered by Roman emperors in the Senate in support of their legislative proposals. While these imperial addresses initially resembled the traditional speeches of senators, over the course of the Principate they gradually evolved into an autonomous source of law. Despite their significance, they have received little scholarly attention. Moreover, existing research has largely concentrated on the relationship between the imperial oratio and the subsequent senatus consultum. In contrast, this project adopts a broader perspective, treating the oratio principis and its associated legislative process as a crucial point of interaction between the emperor and the Senate—a formalized moment of institutional engagement. In this capacity, the speeches played a central role in shaping the relationship between the emperor and the Senate, and more broadly, in articulating and legitimizing imperial authority. Through legal and contextual analysis of individual orationes, the project aims to shed light not only on their development as a source of law but also on their wider societal and political functions.

  • The EPISTULAE project (collaboration with Zachary Herz (CU Boulder), Matthijs Wibier (University of Cincinnati) and Serena Connolly (Rutgers University)

The Roman Epistulae Project will be an open-access, searchable online database of imperial correspondence. Currently, imperial letters are siloed into different databases based on medium of preservation (with, for example, www.papyri.info collecting imperial letters preserved on papyrus) or on the region in which they were found (such as the self-explanatory Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea). This archival practice obscures important generic features of imperial writing; keeping separate databases of papyri and inscriptions, for example, makes it harder to see what sorts of letters were inscribed on stone and which stayed on paper. Similarly, these databases are organized around the concerns of specialists in given materials or areas, not the broader histories of imperial representation and perception that could benefit from a broad corpus of imperial writing. The Roman Epistulae Project will offer researchers free access to a wide corpus of imperial letters, from which they can isolate subgroups using modern methods of database filtering; our encoding follows field-standard XML-based TEI and EpiDoc encoding practices. Furthermore, teachers at all levels will be able to use The Roman Epistulae Project for easy access to primary sources, described in plain language and accompanied by images and translations that can easily be fit into history or literature courses.

 

Dissertations

Ward Strengers, The implied pledge of the Roman fiscus (provisional title; 2023-2026)

Starting at the end of the first century AD, the Roman imperial bureaucracy greatly expanded. At the same time, the fiscus, the Roman imperial treasury, began to exert more influence on Roman law and society. As tax levying professionalized, the fiscus had to manifest its position, especially in relation to private creditors. In this respect, one particular interesting phenomenon emerging in legal documents is the fiscal general pledge on all the assets of the fiscal debtor. 

This thesis aims to set out the legal framework of debt security that the fiscus had at its disposal. In the Corpus Iuris Civilis, we come across several cases where the treasury finds itself competing with (other) private creditors. Seemingly evolving from an expressly agreed upon right to an implied pledge, the varying ranking and treatment of the fiscal claim in relation to other private creditors has inspired a lively academic debate. Mainly, this thesis will examine the origins, scope, evolving nature, third-party effects and execution of the fiscal pledge. 

Furthermore, the imperial treasury and its legal instruments will be placed into context of Roman society and economy.  When discussing the reciprocal influence of law and society, this thesis will also address competing theories concerning the origin of the fiscal claim, notably the Roman-Egyptian πρωτοπραξία. The thesis hopes to provide a deeper insight into the workings of the fiscal pledge, draw some conclusions on the place of the fiscal pledge in Roman debt security law, as well as prompt some reflections on the desired legal and societal place of a treasury in general.