Notes on Contributors
Kalliopi (Kelly) A. Bourdara
is Professor Emerita of History of Law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Law School. Former Member of the Greek Parliament and Minister. She taught History of Law, especially Byzantine Law at the Athens University. She has also taught and given series of lectures at universities in Europe and the USA. She is the author of many books and articles mainly on Byzantine public and penal law.
Wolfram Brandes
is retired Professor of medieval history (specializing in Byzantium) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He has published books on the urban system of Asia Minor and on the history of Byzantine financial administration and was editor of many conference proceedings and of volumes on different topics. In addition to Byzantine legal and administrative history studies, he has done a great deal of research on eschatological concepts in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He is editor of the Companions to the Byzantine World (Brill) and co-editor of the Millennium-Yearbook and the Millennium-Studies (de Gruyter). He is currently working on a monograph on the reign of Justinian II.
Zachary Chitwood
is Professor of Byzantine Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant NOMOS (“The Challenge of Islam and the Transformation of Eastern Christian Normative Regimes, ca. 630–1100”). His publications on Byzantine law include the monograph Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056 (2017).
Giuseppe Falcone
is Professor of Roman Law at the University of Palermo and of Roman Legal Science at the Corso di Alta Formazione in Diritto romano of the University of Roma “La Sapienza”. During 2011–13 he was appointed as Honorary Professor at the Scheltema-Chair on Byzantine Law at the University of Groningen. He is Director of the review Annali del Seminario giuridico (AUPA). His main scientific interests are: Roman private law, Roman juristic literature, Gaius’s Institutes, codifications of Late Antiquity, Justinian’s Institutes, and Theophilus’s Paraphrasis. He published several articles on the antecessorial method and literature and on Theophilus’s work. Among other monographs, he published Il metodo di compilazione delle Institutiones di Giustiniano (1998) and Studi sui commentarii “istituzionali” di Gaio. I. Formazione e natura del testo (2022).
Andreas Gkoutzioukostas
is Professor of Byzantine History and Institutions at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His research addresses the institutional history of the Byzantine Empire. He is particularly interested in the administrative structures and officials of the Byzantine state, Byzantine seals and inscriptions, the administration of justice, and the Byzantine prosopography. Author of several articles and monographs including “Administration of Justice in Byzantium (9th–12th Centuries): Secular Judicial Officers and Courts of the Capital” (in Greek, 2004), “The Office of mystikos. Institutional and Prosopographical Problems” (in Greek, 2011) and “Thessalonician Epigraphical Essays: Chronological and Interpretational Approaches to Byzantine Donor Inscriptions from the Walls and the Basilica of Saint Demetrius” (in Greek, 2020).
Fausto Goria
is Professor Emeritus of Roman Law at the University of Turin, where he taught as a full professor for over 30 years and where he also held some academic offices. He is a national member of the Academy of Sciences of Turin. Throughout his career he has been interested in Justinianic law and its later developments in the Eastern Roman Empire; these themes were treated already in his first monograph (on the marriage of an adulteress, 1975) and even more deeply in the book on marriage law in the Ecloga privata aucta. His minor contributions in this field touch upon a variety of legal questions, such as sources of the law, Roman citizenship in the 6th century, patrimonial relations between spouses, judicial organization, trial law, and the position and work of jurists: many of these writings were collected in the volume Diritto romano d’Oriente. Scritti scelti di Fausto Goria (2016). Later, among other themes he dealt with oral wills (2016) and with the legal relationship between mothers and children in Roman law until Leo III’s Ecloga (2018).
Vasileios-Alexandros Kollias
is a researcher at the Research Centre for the History of Greek Law of the Academy of Athens. His research areas are legal history (emphasizing the Byzantine and post-Byzantine period) and ecclesiastical law. He is author of the monograph The Chrysobulls in the Byzantine Law: From Their Appearance to 1204 AD (in Greek, 2020). He is a lawyer at the Greek Supreme Court and a member of the Athens Bar Association.
Alexander Liarmacopulus
is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Law at the Aristotle University of Thessalonica. He also teaches History of Law and Byzantine Legal Literature in the Democritus University of Thrace. He serves as the secretary of the Greek Society of Legal History. He studied law at the University of Athens (2002), Greek philology at the University of Ioannina (2007), and theology at the University of Athens (2011). He also holds an LLM in the History of Law (University of Athens, 2004) and an MA in Orthodox Theology (Patras, 2007). He received his Ph.D. in Byzantine Law (University of Athens, 2012). His most recent work is the monograph: Legal History of the Despotate of Epirus, 1205–1215 (Athens, 2023). His research is focused on the sources of Byzantine law and canon law.
Valerio Massimo Minale
is Associate Professor of Roman Law at the Department of Law of the Federico II University of Naples, where he teaches Roman and Byzantine Law. He is regularly guest as visiting professor at Belgrade in Serbia, and at Sofia in Bulgaria. Recently, he has also taught at Wuhan in China. He is devoted especially to the influence that was exercised by the Byzantine world on the Slavic legal systems, and he now focuses mainly on the Isaurian lawgiver. He is author of several articles together with three books (Legislazione imperiale e manicheismo da Diocleziano a Costantino. Genesi di un’eresia, 2013; L’appello nell’ultima età dei severi. Per uno studio sul De appellationibus di Emilio Macro, 2017; La materia fedecommissaria tra giurisprudenza e legislazione. Un percorso attraverso l’opera di Volusio Meciano, 2020).
Eleftheria Papagianni
served as Professor of History of Law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Law School, where she taught History of Law and Byzantine Law. She retired on the 31st of August 2024. Since 1981 she has participated in the international research project for the republication of Byzantine legal sources of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences based in Frankfurt am Main (Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte). She served as director of the project (2008 to 2011) and since then, until its completion (31/12/2020), as member of its Steering Committee. She is the author of many books and articles, mainly on Byzantine civil law.
Kalliopi Papakonstantinou
is Associate Professor of Legal History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her dissertation is about the ‘Collatio dotis’ in ancient Roman law (Köln, Bӧhlau Verlag, 1998). Her work includes several books, one about the ‘Ius abstinendi’, a praetorian innovation in ancient Rome, two about the functions of the judicial decision in ancient Greece (Thessaloniki, University Studio Press, 2015 and 2021), and several articles and contributions about institutions and principles of ancient legal orders (laws of the Greek cities, Roman and Byzantine law). She is also co-author and co-editor of the collective work ‘Ancient drama, law and politics’ (Athens, Asini editions, 2023). She is currently working on the intertextuality in ancient texts and on the regulae iuris in Roman law.
Daphne Penna
is Assistant Professor of Legal History at the University of Groningen and Associate Professor of Roman Law at the KU Leuven. She is the author of The Byzantine Imperial Acts to Venice, Pisa and Genoa, 10th–12th Centuries. A Comparative Legal Study (The Hague, 2012) and co-author of A Sourcebook on Byzantine Law. Illustrating Byzantine Law through the Sources (Leiden, 2022, co-author: R. Meijering). Penna’s interests lie in Roman and Byzantine law and especially in their influence on the European legal tradition; she has published extensively on this area.
Peter Sarris
is Professor of Late Antique, Medieval, and Byzantine Studies at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2006), Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam (Oxford, 2011), Byzantium: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2015), and Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint (Basic Books, 2023). With David Miller, he also published The Novels of Justinian: A Complete Annotated English Translation (Cambridge, 2018).
Dieter Simon
Born in 1935, he studied law, history, and philosophy in Heidelberg and Munich from 1955 to 1959. After passing the second state law examination, he worked as a research assistant at the Faculty of Law at Ludwig Maximilian University and habilitated in the subjects of civil law and legal history in 1968. From 1968 to 1995, he taught civil law, legal theory, and legal history (with a focus on antiquity and Byzantium) at the Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. From 1980 to 2003, he headed the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, which, among other things, hosted the international project that he founded, “Byzantine Legal Sources”, which ran until 2020. From 1995 to 2005, he was president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and at the same time taught legal theory, rhetoric, and the contemporary history of law as an honorary Professor at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Marios Th. Tantalos
is a member of the Teaching Staff in the Department of Legal History at the University of Athens. He studied history and law at the University of Athens, where he defended his thesis on “Possessio and Its Protection in the Late Roman and Byzantine Law”. He has been an external Research Assistant at the research programme run by the Academy of Göttingen entitled “Edition und Bearbeitung byzantinischer Rechtsquellen” and directed by Professor Emeritus Dr. D. Simon. In 2019 he was granted a scholarship by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung for post-doc research at the University of Groningen (2019–21). His research focuses on Byzantine and post-Byzantine law.
Spyros Troianos†
was Professor of Legal History at the University of Athens from 1971 to 2000. Troianos was one of the most renowned legal historians and a distinguished Byzantinist. He wrote over 250 independent publications on the history of law and more than 20 books in the field of Byzantine and ecclesiastical law. His publications include critical editions and translations of Byzantine legal sources into Modern Greek, essays on Byzantine and ecclesiastical legal sources up to manuals of Byzantine and ecclesiastical law. His book on the “Sources of Byzantine Law” (
Thomas E. van Bochove
is researcher of Byzantine Law at the Department of Legal History, Faculty of Law, Groningen University. He is the author of the monograph To Date and Not to Date: On the Date and Status of Byzantine Law Books, Groningen 1996 (this book has also been translated into Modern Greek in 2007). His main research interest is the Basilica, the 9th-century thematic rearrangement of the 6th-century legislation of the emperor Justinian. He has published many studies and articles on the Basilica, and is responsible for Brill’s Basilica Online Bibliography (https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/basilica-online#part2).