지진(地震)과 법 -로마법의 경우- = Earthquake in Classical Roman Law

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Motivated by the Great Earthquake of the Eastern Japan on March 11, 2011, this paper looks after the cases of Roman law in which earthquakes are mentioned and dealt with as a legal issue. We can find out several cases in which earthquakes destroy buildings and fields and thus cause Roman lawyers to solve the legal problems rising out of that vis maior, irresistible force of nature. Especially jurists of the late Republic, Servius, Labeo, and Namusa set the criterium of distributing risk among persons concerned and thus put the foundation for later discussions by their successors in the Imperial period, Sabinus, Javolenus, Papinianus, Ulpianus, and Paulus. This criterium is: whether or not the damages are caused by earthquakes or by the inherent deficiency of the thing itself. The concrete legal consequences differ according to the constellation of the cases. Legal issues they treated concerned res sacra (temple), locatio conductio rei (field), locatio conductio operis (building contract), cautio damni infecti, actio aquae pluviae arcendae, pollicitatio, and usus fructus (destruction of objects). These cases also show clearly enough that Roman jurists practiced their famous disputatio fori over the generations to find out reasonable solutions.