NORMATIVE THERMODYNAMICS: A Formal Structural Analogy and Its Empirical Grounding (Roman Law Series)

Why did Roman law govern Western civilisation for fifteen centuries — and what does thermodynamics have to do with it?Normative Thermodynamics offers a radical answer to one of legal history's most enduring puzzles. Drawing on Shannon's information theory, Prigogine's dissipative structures, and Landauer's principle, Dr. iur. Cor P.M. van Houte demonstrates that the central institutions of Roman private law — usucapio and the Formula procedure — functioned as precisely the kind of entropy-management mechanisms that information theory predicts make complex systems durable.This is not metaphor. The book generates three independently falsifiable predictions about prescription periods, title dispute frequency, and institutional bifurcation — predictions confirmed across six legal systems spanning Ptolemaic Egypt, pre-BGB German law, English common law, and Ottoman land tenure reform. The structural collapse of the late Roman system, and the paradox of the Justinianic codification that failed and yet guaranteed fifteen centuries of authority, receive a causal explanation that Weber, Luhmann, and Posner cannot provide.Written at the intersection of Roman legal scholarship, legal theory, and the philosophy of science, Normative Thermodynamics introduces legal thermodynamics as a new analytical discipline — epistemologically honest about what it claims, rigorous about what it does not. For scholars of Roman law, legal theory, jurisprudence, the history of science, and institutional durability.Habilitation treatise. Peer-reviewed by five independent commission members. Read more