Rome brought iustitia to her subjects: thus ran one central legitimising claim of the empire's ideology. It is this contention that the reviewed volume (the conference proceedings from the Impact of Empire's 2017 Network meeting) takes as its starting point. The editors should be congratulated on the speed from conference to publication. Stylistic imprints occasionally result, as some of the entries are lightly referenced and perhaps remain close to the spoken papers; a few typological errors have also slipped through. But these do not generally detract from the quality of contributions in a volume that constitutes a logical addition to the Impact series.

The focus of the book is neither juristic nor philosophical. Instead, Koenraad Verboven and Olivier Hekster express their intent to explore the construction of Rome's offer of justice from the point of view of various subject groups (2): what did they consider just? How were such views legitimated, did they change over time and how in turn did they affect various aspects of Roman practice (administration, policy making, judicial)? ‘Notions, practice and ideology’ (3) underpin the contributions and are used as unifying principles across the volume, which is divided into three sections. These encompass eleven chapters plus the general Introduction, involving fourteen contributors in total.

Part I, ‘The Emperor and Justice’ (four chapters) considers the various discourses surrounding the central imperial figure. Stéphane Benoist and Anne Gangloff (ch. 2) link imperial iustitia neatly back to ideas in the republican era, giving a longer perspective to a section that would otherwise focus heavily on the High Empire to Late Antiquity. Most of Part I concentrates on centre rather than periphery in order to demonstrate the developing idea of the emperor as source of justice and ultimate judge, as well as his increasing role in the ideology of justice, law making and legal practice as the principate evolved. Matthias Wibier (ch. 5) does shift to Autun and the way that legal students at a lower level used textbooks (in which we also see such developments) to navigate political power structures. The use of legal texts as vehicles for ideological messages (see especially Elsemieke Daalder, ch. 3) emerges quite strongly from this section, and as a whole there might have been room to explore further the rather interesting idea of law conceptualised as communication (hinted at by Daalder passim, Francesco Bono 84, Wibier 99), not just the ‘protectress of interests’ (3) that the editors initially laid out.

Part II, ‘Justice in a Dispersed Empire’ (four chapters) turns to some of the practical difficulties entailed by the sheer size of an empire inhabited by populations with multiple legal traditions and containing multiple legal fora. Juan Manuel Cortés-Copete's emphasis on the emergence of the emperor as exclusive law maker (ch. 6, 118) links well to the preceding section, and the examination of Hadrian's actions as a turning point adds a welcome chronological specificity to the developmental trends. Frédéric Hurlet's delineation of general principles (subsidiarity and hierarchy) by which justice was organised (ch. 7) is admirably clear in synthesising the large amount of information in R. Haensch (ed.), Recht haben und Recht bekommen im Imperium Romanum (2018); Clifford Ando's observations on the emergence of a more concrete idea of substantive justice as a means of appeal (ch. 8) adds a further dimension to the evolving discourses that were explored in Part I. In some ways, however, the focus of Part II remains on central policy and practices, and the experiences of subject groups are relatively muted: Peter Herz (ch. 9) is the first really to foreground this and truly engage with the darker underside to empire — i.e. the large amount of lawlessness that was experienced in many of the un-urbanised areas throughout the empire and the limits to the local control mechanisms on which so much relied.

While Part III, ‘Justice for All?’, does attempt to push the exploration of limits further, the examination of possible counterclaims to the imperial ideology here is relatively partial in the groups it tackles. Aside from the final chapter (Margherita Carucci, ch. 12) on artistic representations of damnatio ad bestias and spectacles as a manner of visualising and performing Roman justice, the section primarily considers the perspectives of women on whether particular facets of the law were ‘just’ (Elena Köstner, ch. 10; Pilar Pavón, ch. 11). There are some important observations and interesting material here, especially on the protests at the time of the abrogation of the Lex Oppia (Pavón, 208) and in Köstner's attempt to delineate the boundaries of the ancient conception of justice. But there is also a sense that a modern perspective underlies the point of departure in much of the investigation in this section (how could the law be ‘just’ when it disadvantaged certain groups?) that belied the earlier promise not to impose such value judgements on the ancient context (Verboven and Hekster, 2). This also sits oddly with the justified emphasis in Köstner's conclusion (194–5) on societal norms as grounding any understanding of justice. The section as a whole does not quite come together in the same way as the first two, and one might have expected more consideration of other apparently disadvantaged groups within the vast span of empire in order to give the exploration of the limits of Roman justice greater weight.

Indeed, in this respect the volume does not quite fulfil the claims the editors make for it in their Introduction: subjects’ experiences and perceptions in the larger sense do not come across as the key theme. Instead, this is a very interesting collection of essays that mainly looks at imperial conceptions and approaches. This includes consideration of subjects' responses in informing such ideas and practices, but they are not truly foregrounded (with the exceptions of Hurlet and Herz); such an attempt would most likely have entailed additional contributions that emphasised the papyrological record to a larger degree. The conclusion that we should not take too bleak a view of justice in the empire (Verboven and Hekster, 14) is thus understandable in the light of the contributions offered here, but perhaps remains somewhat under-scrutinised from a wider perspective. The volume as a whole therefore constitutes a very interesting, though partial, contribution to the conversation on the complexities of justice in the empire, albeit not quite in the way that is initially set up.