Analyzing Anonymity in Justinian’s Digest:
A Quantitative Approach

142 Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Romanistische Abteilung (2025) 547–73

This article argues that Romanists can use regression analysis to isolate differences in juristic corpora, even within unrepresentative samples of juristic writing like the Digest. In particular, I show that Severan jurists were approximately three times as likely as their predecessors to cite imperial legal decisionmaking using anonymous forms. I argue that this change in citational practice responded to the turbulent imperial politics of the early third century C.E., while also laying the groundwork for the institutionalizing maneuvers of the later third and fourth.

Beyond the Constitutions of Marcus:
Cassius Dio, Italian Volksrecht, and the Trouble with Law on the Books

Klio 107 (2025) 126–48

In Book 79[78] of the “Roman History,” Cassius Dio claims that under Macrinus, Italian δικαιονόμοι “ceased to judge beyond the constitutions of Marcus”. Historians have traditionally read this claim to mean that Marcus Aurelius had issued legislation limiting the jurisdiction of Italian iuridici, that these officials had taken on greater responsibilities since Marcus’ death, and that Macrinus briefly restored Marcus’ original scheme. I argue instead that Dio describes Italian judges autonomously refusing to recognize the constitutions of Marcus’ successors as legally valid. I then suggest that Dio’s account of Italian adjudication fits better with the fluid and political legal culture that scholars have long found in provincial sources, and that Italian legal practice may have more closely resembled that of the provinces than traditional pluralist accounts of Roman law have led us to think. 

The Epistemology of the Courthouse:
Classical Antiquity in American LGBT-Rights Ligitation

Joseph Fischel and Brenda Cossman (eds.), Enticements: Queer Legal Studies (NYU Press, 2024)
29–58

How to Do the History of Elagabalus

Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory (Routledge, 2023) 408–22

This chapter discusses ethical and methodological issues inherent to the historiography of the late Severan emperor Elagabalus (r. 218–222 CE). Elagabalus was a child emperor whose hostile biographical tradition accused him of various forms of sexual and gender deviance. Later historians have often taken these accusations literally and portrayed Elagabalus as the victim of a homo- or transphobic political culture; this chapter argues that the queer Elagabalus who survives in our sources is likely a figment of those sources’ imagination. It then applies a framework inflected by queer media analysis to our stories about Elagabalus and argues that his Severan biographers used gendered tropes to reassert their agency in a changing political environment. The chapter concludes by discussing the ethical problems inherent in looking to Elagabalus as an exemplar of sexual liberation.

Straight Talk about Curved Horns and Gay Marriage:
A New Reading of Juvenal’s Second Satire

Classical Quarterly 73 (2023) 822–36

This article argues that one of our only pieces of evidence for Roman marriage between cinaedi, Juvenal’s second satire, has been consistently misread and in fact describes a marriage between a cinaedus and a sex worker. It begins by providing the context for the passage in question and its traditional reading, and then demonstrates that the critical phrase siue hic recto cantauerat aere refers to financial, not erotic, exchanges. The article finally discusses the implications of this correction, which are far more substantial than one might expect for a contentious ablative.

Precedential Reasoning and Dynastic Self-Fashioning in the Rescripts of Severus Alexander

Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte 69 (2020) 103–25

This article argues that the rescripts of Severus Alexander (r. 222–235 C. E.) preserved within the Codex Iustinianus are markedly idiosyncratic in their reasoning; specifically, they are disproportionately likely to analogize Alexander’s decisions to those of earlier emperors. This tendency suggests a conscious effort to portray Alexander as hewing to earlier Severan and Antonine models of governance, and conforms with Alexander’s public image in other media more commonly understood as ideologically charged.

The Marrying Kind

Tennessee Law Review 83 (2015) 83–159

We are living in a Constitutional moment. In the span of half a century, LGBT people have been cast out, tolerated, accepted, and finally celebrated: In time with that shift, same-sex marriage has gone from absurdity, to threat, to fundamental right. This Article queries the links between those two processes and their potential implications for constitutional anti-discrimination law more broadly. Specifically, this Article considers two features of equal protection jurisprudence that have entered into strange, silent conflict: the discriminatory purpose doctrine established in Washington v. Davis and Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, and the tendency of courts to treat same-sex marriage bans as straightforward sexual-orientation discrimination. According to astrict reading of this doctrine, same-sex marriage bans would only disproportionately impact gays and lesbians while facially classifying on the basis of sex. This Article shows how courts on both sides of the issue, uncomfortable with the implications of the discriminatorypurpose doctrine when applied to such bans, largely ignored discriminatory purpose in favor of analytic frameworks that better reflect the social realities of the same-sex marriage debate. This Article then considers Justice Kennedy’s treatment of the classification problem in Obergefell v. Hodges, and the possible ramifications of Kennedy’s holding that same-sex marriage bans demean gays and lesbians for the future of anti-discrimination law.

The Effect of Bankruptcy on Roman Imperial Credit Markets

Business and Bankruptcy Law Review 2 (2015) 207–49

Given the importance of lending to economies both ancient and modern, and given the widely acknowledged relevance of creditor and debtor protections for nurturing a vibrant and productive credit market, a large critical literature has developed exploring the intersection of law and lending. However, little work has been done analyzing the role of default law in historical credit markets, particularly those in the ancient world. This article attempts to remedy that gap by considering the interaction between Imperial Rome’s famously pro-debtor default laws and its idiosyncratic credit practices. By constructing a hypothetical model derived from economic analysis of foreign and domestic credit markets and comparing that model’s predictions to literary, historical, and documentary evidence of late Republican and early Imperial lending behavior, this article demonstrates the applicability of a law-and-economics analysis to the Roman world and provides a historical study into the dangers of excessive debtor protection without highly sophisticated risk-sorting procedures on the part of creditors.

Price’s Progress: Sex Stereotype and Its Potential for Antidiscrimination Law

Yale Law Journal 124 (2014) 396–446

American antidiscrimination law has addressed harmful stereotypes since, at least, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Stereotypes about the different abilities of men and women, or of black and white workers, lay underneath much of the segregation and workplace inequality that Title VII sought to correct. However, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins has radically expanded our conception of stereotypes as discrimination, and in doing so has introduced revolutionary ideas to the workplace and the courts. Prior to Price Waterhouse, Title VII had been thought to apply only to ascriptive stereotyping—to monolithic misconceptions burdening all members of a disfavored group. Price Waterhouse’s extension of Title VII protection to victims of prescriptive stereotype has constituted a massive, and heretofore unstudied, conceptual leap. This Note examines how Price Waterhouse’s prohibition against stereotyping can transform American workplace law and analyzes one area where it already has—antigay discrimination. By contrasting the requirements for proving antigay discrimination under a Price Waterhouse sex stereotyping theory with the traditional Title VII methods that many states use to protect LGBT workers, I show both how Price Waterhouse can complement proposed LGBT-specific protections such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and how its normative vision is a vital addition to existing antidiscrimination law.