Image

We are delighted to welcome Professor Dario Mantovani for the 2026 Collège de France - Maison Française d'Oxford - Pembroke College lecture. 
 
Professor Mantovani will give a lecture on ' Thinking Law through Metaphor: Reason and Imagination in the Language of Roman Jurists’ (Penser le droit par métaphores : raison et imagination dans le langage des juristes romains) 
 

Please note that registration is mandatory to attend this event. Register here. 
 

“No art can utter a word without the help of metaphors.” This striking claim appears in a fragment of Philodemus of Gadara’s On Rhetoric, recovered from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (4, p. I 175.15–18 Sudhaus). It anticipates a central insight of the twentieth-century metaphorical turn: metaphor is not merely a stylistic ornament, but an essential instrument for understanding, organizing, and producing knowledge. In law, however, metaphor has a distinctive role. Legal language does more than describe reality: it constitutes a normative world of relations and entities whose conceptual articulation often depends 

on figurative representations. For legislators, judges, and legal scholars, metaphor is therefore a necessity. 

This lecture explores the different functions of metaphor in Roman juristic language, from which the civil-law tradition has inherited much of its figurative repertoire. 

These expressions serve a stylistic function, making discourse easier to understand and remember; they also extend the legal vocabulary, providing names for concepts and relationships. But they perform a further, less studied function: they help jurists argue for particular legal solutions. As selected examples will show, such imagery can guide the decision whether a legacy of a ship includes its boat, or explain why ownership of land passes together with the servitudes that benefit or burden it. Metaphors do not simply illustrate a conclusion: they contribute to the reasoning that sustains it. 

Recovering the concepts and mental images underlying these expressions provides access to Roman ways of thinking, while illuminating how law works. It also allows us to ask how much of this metaphorical inheritance remains active in modern civil-law thought. 

Biography

A legal historian trained in law, Dario Mantovani specialises in the law of ancient Rome. He approaches Roman law from two perspectives: as an expression of Roman society, of which it was a fundamental structural component; and through the influence of ancient legal thought on European culture since the medieval rediscovery of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which was itself instrumental in the rise of universities. 

Within the first perspective, his research has focused on the forms of argument used by Roman jurists to devise equitable solutions to conflicts of interest (see the studies collected in Pensiero e forme letterarie dei giuristi romani, 3 vols., Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2024). He also examines the expressive forms of these arguments and their connections with related cultural fields: Latin literature, including poetry, philosophy and, above all, rhetoric. This approach has enabled him to identify intersections between rhetorical school declamations and juristic reasoning. It has also led him to propose that the works of Roman jurists should be understood as literature in their own right (Les juristes écrivains de la Rome antique. Les œuvres des juristes comme littérature, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2018 = La letteratura invisibile. I giuristi scrittori di Roma antica, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2024). 

His interest extends to the material conditions in which this literature circulated. He directed the interdisciplinary ERC project Redhis, working particularly with papyrologists and palaeographers to identify Roman legal works preserved on papyrus and parchment in European and American papyrological collections. These witnesses document the circulation and use of juristic writings between the third and sixth centuries CE. The project demonstrated the persistence of a high-level legal culture into late antiquity, while also shedding light on the methods used to compile Justinian’s Digest. 

As regards the substantive study of Roman law, his research has concentrated particularly on criminal and civil procedure, as settings in which law was applied through adversarial argument. This interest led him, among other things, to reconstruct the formulae used in Roman private litigation (Le formule del processo privato romano, Padua, Cedam, 2nd ed., 1999). 

His work on the influence of Roman law in the medieval and modern periods has examined the role of legal concepts within other disciplines, including aequitas, auctoritas, legal certainty and ius naturale (see L’équité hors du droit, Paris, Éditions du Collège de France, 2023). He has also studied major figures and works of European culture through their relationship with the Roman legal tradition: Dante’s De Monarchia, Jacques Cujas, Ugo Foscolo, and Alessandro Manzoni and his interpretation of Lombard rule in Italy (most recently, Jacques Cujas : la fabrique d’un « grand juriste », with A. Gottely and X. Prévost, Paris, Éditions du Collège de France, 2024). 

To provide a more systematic framework for studying the transmission of cultural knowledge, particularly from antiquity, Mantovani has taken a special interest in the history of universities. This interest also reflects his commitment to teaching, which led him to establish Cedant, a doctoral school devoted to the laws of antiquity, in Pavia, and, with J.-L. Ferrary and H. Ménard, to create the introductory workshop on sources of Roman law at the École française de Rome. He edited Almum Studium Papiense. A History of the University of Pavia from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century in six volumes; more recently, he co-directed Il capitolare di Lotario e l'Università di Pavia, 825-1925-2025: storia e invenzione di una tradizione, Cisalpino, Milano, 2026. He is currently working with a small interdisciplinary team on a history of the statutes and regulations governing the Collège de France, based on their collection and critical edition from the institution’s foundation in 1530 onwards. He also chairs the committee established to mark the Collège de France fifth centenary. His current courses at the Collège de France reflect these research interests. He seeks to make them accessible to a wider public and to renew interest in a discipline whose teaching remains relatively limited. Topics have included the use of metaphor by Roman jurists to conceptualise and formulate legal notions, and the influence of natural law on modern thought, extending to contemporary debates on the “rights of nature”. 

Mantovani aims, as far as possible, to understand law from the perspective of those who shaped and practised it in antiquity, while tracing its relationships with other forms of discourse that informed legal knowledge and were, in turn, shaped by it. For this approach, as for the study of reception, close reading of texts remains the essential starting point.