Digital Digesta: Unveiling the Origins of Law with AI
3/16/2026
On March 14, 2026, Naoya Iwata (Associate Professor, Nagoya University), in collaboration with Yukiko Kawamoto (Associate Professor, Nagoya University), delivered a presentation titled “Digital Digesta: Unveiling the Origins of Law with AI” at the History of Civil Law Research Group (Minposhi Kenkyukai).
The presentation focused on how the Humanitext project’s infrastructure can be applied to legal history, specifically in analyzing the Digesta (Pandects) and its long-standing influence on modern legal systems.
Finding Law Through “Meaning”
Traditionally, researching legal history required precise knowledge of specific terminology to locate relevant passages in ancient texts. Humanitext changes this paradigm by using AI-driven semantic search. This allows researchers to access the vast corpus of classical legal texts based on conceptual inquiries rather than just keyword matching.
Key highlights of the report included:
- Humanitext Antiqua: Demonstrating the core platform’s ability to handle Western classical and legal sources.
- Structuring the Digesta: Efforts to digitize and structure the foundational texts of Roman law for AI analysis.
- Tracing Legal Succession: A long-term vision to systematically track how Roman legal concepts were integrated into the Japanese Civil Code through cross-referencing digital databases.
Bridging Tradition and Innovation
The session also explored the potential integration with the Nagoya University Law Database. By addressing the challenge of “finding texts using words not explicitly written in them,” the project showcased how AI can augment scholarly intuition and reveal previously hidden connections in legal history.
This presentation sparked an engaging discussion among legal historians on the future of “Digital Legal History” and how AI-assisted interpretive frameworks can revitalize the study of historical legal sources.
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