Does law need jurists (or lawyers, as they are called in the Common law tradition) to perform its regulatory functions? In the Western Legal Tradition, the answer is usually “yes.” The orthodox narrative tells us that law is a human construct in the sense that it would have never come into existence without the great minds of the Roman jurists of the Late Republic (second century BC). Since then, the story goes, the structural link between law and human intellect and sensitivity has always laid at the core of our legal consciousness (with some noticeable exceptions).
This conventional reconstruction not only masks that, in the West, law first emerged in Greece, and not in Rome.
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