In The Roman Law Tradition an international team of distinguished legal scholars explores the various ways in which Roman law has affected and continues to affect patterns of legal decision-making throughout the world. Roman Law began as the local law of a small Italian city. It grew to dominate the legal relationships of the Mediterranean basin for the first five hundred years of our era. The revival of its study in the medieval universities led to its influencing the subsequent development of the legal system of western Europe and thereafter those parts of the rest of the World colonised from Europe. Roman legal ideas penetrated procedure as well as the substance of law and assisted the process of harmonisation and codification of local customary laws. Techniques of legal reasoning which first emerge in Rome continue in daily use. Roman law was also of immense significance in the emergence of modern political thought.