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At the beginning of the 20th century, Leopold Wenger developed a concept of the history of antique law based on global history. Walter Selb changed Wenger’s concept decisively. Antique law had not developed uniformly and continuously, culminating in Justinian´s Roman law, but rather a plurality of laws had existed side by side, mutually influencing one another. Selb demonstrated his ideas in his works on the law of the Christian-Oriental churches. For Selb, the questions posed and the methods used in dealing with ancient sources from the Ancient Orient through the Byzantine and Meta-Byzantine periods are the only concord that exists between himself and Wenger. Eight years after Selb´s death on June 2, 1994, his co-editor Hubert Kaufhold completed Selb’s Magnum opus, a new edition of the Syrian-Roman Book of Law. To mark this occasion, scholars met in a conference on October 29, 2004 to present their current positions. The individual topics stress plurality rather than uniformity. The volume includes papers by Gerhard Ries, Munich (Ancient Orient), Alberto Maffi, Milan (Greek law), Hans-Albert Rupprecht, Marburg/Lahn (Papyri), Detlef Liebs, Freiburg/Br. (postclassical Roman law), and Ludwig Burgmann, Frankfurt/M. (survival of byzantine legal texts). Hubert Kaufhold, Munich, and Peter E. Pieler, Vienna, commemorate working with Walter Selb.
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