Legal production of space in the Roman world: a methodological assessment

Roman legal scholarship has long examined land primarily through the lens of ownership – as a res to be protected, transferred, and exploited. This article proposes a complementary perspective: land as spatium, a physical and social space that acquires legal significance through concrete acts of qualification and delimitation. Building on the well-established framework of spatial studies, and in particular on Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of space, it introduces the concept of the ‘legal production of space’ as a hermeneutic tool for the analysis of Roman land categories. The qualifier ‘legal’ refers specifically to the fundamentally action-based nature of Roman law whereby legal realities did not precede but emerged from the procedural acts through which individuals and magistrates asserted, defined, and protected claims. This framework does not entail an inquiry into whether the Romans consciously perceived themselves as producing space; it offers, rather, an analytical lens through which to examine Roman legal procedures – in gromatic literature, augural practice, and magisterial acts of land division and assignment – as mechanisms of spatial qualification. In doing so, it provides a methodological alternative to ownership-centred approaches, opening a more dynamic understanding of how legal norms and categories emerged from concrete spatial practices in the shaping of the Roman territorial order.