Research Interests in Roman Law
My current research in Roman law primarily develops along two complementary lines.
On the one hand, I focus on the recovery and critical edition of Codex XV (13) of Gaius’ Institutiones, with particular attention to the identification of submerged writings in palimpsest manuscripts. This work combines traditional philological practice with the use of advanced imaging technologies—such as multispectral imaging, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and many others—as well as artificial intelligence tools designed to reconstruct damaged or incomplete legal texts, through an approach that seeks to remain as faithful as possible to the author’s modus exponendi.
On the other hand, I investigate the intersection between Roman legal sources and computational linguistics, applying deep learning models and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to the analysis and reconstruction of fragmentary texts. I have developed hybrid systems that combine Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BiRNN) with deterministic algorithms, employed to predict missing characters within stretches of scriptio continua. These systems are integrated with more recent architectures and alternative machine learning models, adopted to enhance the reliability of the analysis and the overall quality of textual reconstructions.
I also examine the stylistic and lexical dynamics of the Roman juristic tradition, with particular attention to the role of filler words as latent stylistic markers, potentially significant for authorship attribution and textual authentication.
In this context, I have also developed machine learning models for authorship analysis, aimed at isolating distinctive stylistic features and statistically significant linguistic patterns in the writings of Roman jurists. The objective is to combine algorithmic data processing with a structured critical interpretation, grounded in the awareness that Roman legal texts cannot be separated from the logical, linguistic, and systematic contexts in which they were conceived. This approach enables an exploration based on quantitative and semantic analysis of linguistic data, supporting renewed reflection on textual attribution and the reconstruction of the intertextual networks that underpin Roman legal literature.
The analysis of Roman legal texts unfolds on multiple levels: a lexical-surface level, focused on the examination of lexical frequencies, syntactic structures, and stylistic regularities; and a deeper conceptual level, which, through semantic analysis, seeks to reconstruct the underlying juridical categories and normative frameworks embedded in the discourse. This multi-layered approach allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the internal logic of the sources and the argumentation strategies employed by the jurists.
In this light, Roman legal science emerges as a privileged domain for the development of critical and methodological frameworks aimed at investigating, from a contemporary perspective, the systemic interrelations between technological innovation, legal normativity, and the transmission of cultural heritage, reaffirming the hermeneutic vocation of Roman law as a discipline that brings together dogmatic reflection, historical awareness, and interdisciplinary openness.
