Public, private, civil la w, and jus civile: content of the concepts in ancient roman and modern doctrinal sources

Introduction: the theory of legal duality originated from works of ancient Roman jurists. Since the Digest of Justinian appeared, the law has traditionally been divided into public and private by numerous generations of Ulpian's followers. However, modern interpretation of legal duality and the related categories sometimes differs from that of ancient jurists, which can indicate either distortion of the original meaning or its complete loss. This fact brings about the necessity to recover the original content of the concepts. One of the most effective ways to solve such problems is the verification method, that is comparison of messages with the given etalon parameters. Widely used in the theory of communication, this method can be equally applied in legal science. In the present study, in order to reveal discrepancies in the interpretations, the text of the Digest of Justinian, used as an etalon, will be compared to the understanding of legal duality by modern lawyers. Purpose: to determine the true meaning of the concepts of public law, private law, civil law and jus civile through comparing modern interpretation of these categories with that they had in ancient, mostly Roman, law. Results: the study has revealed a significant number of major discrepancies between the modern theory of legal duality and the meanings initially carried by its categories. Distortions were revealed in the understanding of all the key concepts: public law, private law, civil law, and jus civile; jus naturale legal consciousness was found to be replaced with legal consciousness of another type. Conclusions: public law of Ancient Rome in its original meaning has no equals in any modern law, including Russian jurisprudence. According to the famous Russian jurist I. M. Pokrovsky, ancient Roman public law is law created by the god; it could be characterized as a phenomenon of transcendental origin (with Rome, Roman community being perceived as the gods). Thus, through the prism of the Digest, all the modern written law is just private law, or, more specifically, jus civile, and there is no reasonable ground to name it public, let alone associate it with the Ulpian's criterion.