[1] The former term was coined by Ludwig Mitteis [de] in his path-breaking Reichsrecht und Volksrecht in den östlichen Provinzen (Roman Law and Popular Law in the Eastern Provinces, 1891).
Mitteis demonstrated that the Constitutio Antoniniana, which made all free men Roman citizens in 212 AD, did not cause the new Roman citizens to abandon their indigenous legal practices.
[2]: 14–15 [1] Patricia Crone describes the situation in the Roman Near East as follows: [T]here is nothing to suggest that the provincials wished to defy the law of the land.
Thus the Nessanites, who bore names such as Flavius Valens and Flavius al-Ubayy, who toiled over Greek-Latin glossaries with a view to reading Virgil in the original, and who explicitly stated that one legal transaction of theirs was to be regulated in accordance with 'the Imperial Decree', surely did not know that their transactions were not in fact always conducted in accordance with the emperor's law.
[2]: 14 Volksrecht is not to be confused with vulgar law, a term used to refer to local evolutions from (and simplifications of) Roman legal institutions.