Roman Law "implies that property is not a set of understandings between people over who gets to use or look after things, but rather a relation between a person and an object characterized by absolute power" (508-9)
"Roman Law conceptions of property (and hence of freedom) essentially trace back to slave law"
"in Roman Law, the power of the master rendered the slave a thing (res, meaning an object), not a person with social rights or legal obligations to anyone else. Property law, in turn, was largely about the complicated situations that might arise as a result."
510: "in Roman jurisprudence the logic of war--which dictates that enemies are interchangeable, and if they surrendered they could either be killed or rendered 'socially dead,' sold as commodities--and, therefore, the potential for arbitrary violence was inserted into the most intimate sphere of social relations, including the relations of care that made domestic life possible."