 I'm Dennis Gijo, Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Tulane, where I've taught since 1982. The focus of my research is on the society and economy of the Roman Empire, and, in particular, on the complex role in these played by Roman law and legal institutions. We can see the products of the Roman economy and the spectacular archaeological remains from ancient Rome, including temples in the Roman Forum, amphitheaters in Rome and other cities, aqueducts, imperial villas, and the impressive houses at Pompeii. Underpinning these material remains was an economy that, as in all pre-industrial societies, was dominated by agriculture. Consequently, most of my own research has been on agrarian relationships to see how upper-class Romans engaged in economic planning and how the Roman imperial government formulated policies in an economy subject to constraints imposed by population and technology. One basic question concerns whether Roman law played a positive role in the economy by providing incentives for investment in greater productivity. The Roman government would have accomplished this purpose by developing a system of law that defined and property rights precisely, and by maintaining authoritative legal institutions to facilitate the resolution of disputes in a timely, straightforward, and predictable manner. The alternatives are that the law and legal institutions serve primarily to promote the interests of well-connected groups, even at the expense of society as a whole, or that they were weak and thus exercised little influence on how people organized their economic lives. These questions are, in my view, crucial for understanding the nature of Roman rule, whether it simply fostered the interests of the privilege, or whether, and to what extent, it provided benefits more broadly. Answering these questions requires ingenuity in teasing out information about economic relationships from a variety of sources of evidence. For my part, I've written on land tenure in Roman North Africa largely on the basis of inscriptions, on the management of estates in Roman Egypt using documentary papyri, and on the economic planning of a Roman senator using literary sources. In recent years, the focus of my research has been on reconstructing economic relationships from the ways in which the Roman legal authorities developed rules for various aspects of private property and commercial activity, including land tenure, risk in agriculture, the bequeathing of land and other property, and various forms of agency. The Roman legal authorities include the classical Roman jurists, who over time developed rules for Roman private law, and the Roman emperors and their legal advisors, who modified the law or even created new law as they responded to petitions from people across the empire. This legal material is preserved in the digest and the codex of Justinian. The field of ancient history has long been open to interdisciplinary approaches, and ancient historians have drawn on scholarship in anthropology, economics, law, and even sociology and political science. The new institutional economics and the related field of law and economics have enriched my own research by providing a theoretical perspective for investigating the economic implications arising from various types of property rights and contractual relationships. The new institutional economics suggests ways to understand the incentives guiding economic planning in light of basic constraints on our decision making, such as the costliness of information and the influences of overarching social values on our behavior. In recent years, there's been a new trend in interdisciplinarity involving the ancient world, as scholars from both the fields of economics and law have become interested in the ancient world. For economists, the relatively simple economy of the Roman Empire provides a way to test theories about economic relationships, while legal historians see in Roman law the roots of the ways in which later societies, including our own, have addressed basic economic issues. My most recent publication, a two-volume collection of essays titled, Roman Law and Economics, and published by Oxford University Press, brings together scholars from classics, economics and law to tackle a wide range of issues in Roman society, such as slavery and manumission, the organization of businesses in the ancient world, agency in the Roman economy, and the economic consequences of both Roman legal policies and individual legal rules. The collection was the idea of Giuseppe Dari Mariacci, the co-editor, an Italian economist who has studied classics and maintained an interest in the ancient world. Giuseppe invited me in 2009 to participate in a seminar held at the University of Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics, where he was then teaching and has since moved to Columbia University School of Law. When I arrived in Amsterdam, I learned that my invitation was on the recommendation of a mutual dear friend, Elio Locaccio, now Emeritus Professor of the University La Sapienza in Rome. Professor Locaccio ranks as one of the foremost authorities in Roman history in the world today. Professor Locaccio also provided me with a springboard for my own contribution to this collection, an essay on the Roman contract of mandate, which defined the legal rights and obligations of the parties when one person voluntarily carries out significant financial transactions on behalf of another, without being paid to do so. I first started researching mandate when Professor Locaccio invited me to participate in an annual seminar on Roman law at the University of Pavia in Italy in 2013. My assignment was to talk about the ways in which the Roman jurists treated legal problems when people were managing property on behalf of others. To turn to the Roman law and economics volumes, my colleague Giuseppe Dari Mariacci had the vision for the project and he invited an array of scholars from fields ancient and modern to participate. My original role was as a contributor, but I soon began helping with the editing and eventually became co-editor. I will have to say that this was a lot of work, but it was worthwhile because I learned a great deal. We both hope that the collection will help draw together scholars in many fields into a richer dialogue.