This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the European Research Council.

Roman law is widely considered to be the foundation of European legal culture and an inherent source of unity within European law. Roman Law and the Idea of Europe explores the emergence of this idea of Roman law as an idealized shared heritage, tracing its origins among exiled German scholars in Britain during the Nazi regime. The book follows the spread and influence of these ideas in Europe after the war as part of the larger enthusiasm for European unity. It argues that the rise of the importance of Roman law was a reaction against the crisis of jurisprudence in the face of Nazi ideas of racial and ultranationalistic law, leading to the establishment of the idea of Europe founded on shared legal principles.

With contributions from leading academics in the field as well as established younger scholars, this volume will be of immense interests to anyone studying intellectual history, legal history, political history and Roman law in the context of Europe.

Kaius Tuori is University Lecturer in European Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of The Emperor of Law: The Emergence of Roman Imperial Adjudication (2016) and Lawyers and Savages: Ancient History and Legal Realism in the Making of Legal Anthropology (2014). He is also the co-editor, with Paul J du Plessis and Clifford Ando, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (2016).

Heta Björklund has a PhD in Classics from the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has previously worked as an editor at the Classical journal Arctos.