From Roman Jurisprudence to Modern Japanese Statutes: Tracing the Reception of Law via LLMs and Generative AI

by Naoya Iwata (Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Nagoya University, Japan), Tomoya Sano (Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Nagoya University, Japan), Yukiko Kawamoto (Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Nagoya University, Japan)

Friday 6 Mar 2026, 10:00 → 11:30 Europe/Berlin

online

This seminar session introduces "Digital Digesta," an interdisciplinary project that leverages Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to trace the reception of the Roman legal tradition within the modern Japanese legal system. Although Japanese laws and regulations (Hōrei) were shaped by European models rooted in Roman jurisprudence, systematically identifying the specific pathways of this reception remains a complex hermeneutical challenge.

We propose a novel methodology designed to bridge the gap between classical legal concepts and modern statutes. We begin by digitizing and structuring the Digesta and related documents. Next, we employ LLM-based approaches to analyze the semantic structure of these Roman legal sources. In conjunction with this, we utilize the structured XML database of Japanese laws and imperial ordinances (1886–2017) developed by Sano. By exploring computational methods to cross-reference these distinct legal corpora with generative AI, our project aims to elucidate the intellectual lineage connecting Roman legal thought to the foundations of Japan’s modern legal order, offering a scalable framework for comparative legal history.