Website review

Roman Law Resources
www.iuscivile.com

Hosted by the Law School at the University of Glasgow, this site “provides information on Roman law sources and literature, the teaching of Roman law, and the persons who study Roman law”. Never having studied Roman law myself, I was naturally curious.

The site begins with a disclaimer that having been formerly the subject of regular attacks by “malicious people” unnamed, it has moved to a new server and is therefore incomplete. While that sort of statement always raises the suspicion that it has remained (or will remain) incomplete for some considerable time, this one actually does appear to be quite recent so we will give it the benefit of the doubt.

Complete or not, there is still some very useful material to be found here. Largely a collection of links, these have nonetheless been organised in such a way as to operate like a large cyber library of Roman law sources, journals, websites, discussion etc. I would perhaps have liked an introductory statement or two to the area of Roman law, but perhaps the site isn’t designed with the newcomer in mind.

There is also a collaborative exercise of sorts involving the translation of Justinian’s digest into English and the submission of proposed corrections thereto.

For those of you with an interest in this area, it’s a definite bookmark candidate, and don’t forget to take a peek at the “legacy” pages (www.iuscivile.com/legacy/reprints/), which aim to make certain academic works easily available and do so by allowing the visitor to download them directly as PDF files.

It’s a very straightforward site and could perhaps benefit from some additional widgets (e.g. a wiki platform for the corrections project?), but it seems to work very well and is small enough to get away with the elementary site construction and navigation.

The Stair Society
www.stairsociety.org

The Stair Society, as I’m sure you’re aware, was instituted in 1934 to encourage the study and to advance the knowledge of the history of Scots law. I know that because it’s in large letters just under the words “Stair Society” when you arrive at the home page. Unfortunately, because those words are frozen within an image, which doesn’t contain an “alt” or “longdesc” attribute, no-one with a visual impairment will ever know that – and neither will Google (unless they scroll down the page a bit). This makes me very sad – especially as it is so easily fixed.

The site looks a little bit like it was designed in the 1930s – but not in an altogether bad way. It eschews a lot of the modern web design fads which seem to scream for your attention, in favour of a gentler, more polite approach.

There is much information which is of interest primarily to members or prospective members of the Society, including details of the very reasonable annual subscription fee, and a copy of the constitution.

There is a page of links, all relating to legal history – from Scotland and further afield. However, the links page does not seem to be maintained very closely. In the first section three out of the seven listed links were broken, which was a real disappointment.

The real treat in this site is almost hidden away, under the enigmatic heading “MSS” – clicking here takes the visitor to scanned copies of two very ancient legal texts, complete with extensive historical introductions: the Berne Manuscript (13th century) and the Ayr Manuscript (14th century), both of which are beautifully penned, even if completely indecipherable (at least to me).

SEO SUCCESS

A very brief sidenote just to mention that when Googling “scots law”, the first law firm to rate a search engine listing (on the third page of results, no less) is Ballantyne & Copland (www.ballantyneandcopland.com) from Motherwell. There is no prize awarded for this, but it may send a few extra clients their way – so well done to the firm and their web designers for that.