О САДРЖИНИ ПОЈМА „LEX” У РИМСКОМ ПРАВУ
ON THE CONTENTS OF THE NOTION OF “LEX” IN ROMAN LAW

Summary/Abstract: The terni lex belongs to the oldest language heritage of the ancient Rome, representing one of the fundamental notions of Roman law throughout its entire history. To the present-day it has been retained as such in Romanic languages in the roots of the words denoting the notion of “law”. The author points to numerous etymological explanations of the term lex and asserts that they do not provide a sufficiently solid basis for reliable conclusions concerning the original meaning of this notion. The ancient sources testify to the fact that the area of application of the term lex in Roman law is very wide and that this pluralism provides a relatively diverse picture in which it is difficult to establish certain order, either dogmatic or historical. However, since the times of Rome to the present-day, it has not hindered legal theoreticians from persistently subjecting that vital diversity to the rigid rules, witty conceptions and numerous classifications, trying to impose logic there where it is non-existent in reality. The bulk of the work is devoted to the polemics concerning views of A. Magdelain, who believes that the archaic lex may be recognized on the ground of the formal-language analysis itself of a certain norm, i.e., its imperative expression style. However, the author of the article points both to the weakness of such methodological approach and to the inadmissibility of conclusions derived through that approach. The author believes that it is possible to seize the contents of the notion of lex only by means of a prior analysis of concrete social relations, because law has come into being in order to regulate them. Short of that social dimension the notion of law is being turned into an abstraction deprived of a more profound connection with the reality itself.

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