To find out today's law on a given topic, there are many resources available. The governmental agencies that make the laws have standard places in which to publish them. Commercial publishers collect and distribute the same material (with or without additional information), both on paper and now on-line. Libraries, some general-purpose and others specializing in law, collect these materials. Enthusiastic amateurs and, increasingly, search engines make the texts even more broadly available. To discover Roman law is often a more difficult matter. The bulk of this chapter will discuss the main sources available to us, but it will be worthwhile to begin by noting the kinds of problems we face.

The first and most important problem is one that affects historians asking virtually any question about the Roman world. Most of the evidence available, even to the Romans themselves, was in the form of documents written on paperlike materials. But these typically do not survive the centuries needed to come into our hands. In a few lucky cases, texts were popular enough to be copied and recopied through the ages, but this is rare and still leaves other problems (to be discussed later). A second problem has to do with the sources initially available. Ancient governments did not necessarily make arrangements for wide publication of their laws in the way that modern ones do, nor were there private institutions to publish, circulate, or even centralize legal documents.