Volksrecht
Volksrecht and Provinzialrecht are terms used to describe the legal practices of the Roman provinces which operated in parallel to, or at variance with, codified Roman law. Such practices are manifest in the inscriptions and papyri of the Roman provinces, and the legal rescripta these provincials requested from the Roman imperial core. Egyptian papyri are a rich source of such practices.
The former term was coined by in his path-breaking Reichsrecht und Volksrecht in den östlichen Provinzen. Mitteis demonstrated that the Constitutio Antoniniana, which made all free men Roman citizens in 212 AD, did not cause the new Roman citizens to abandon their indigenous legal practices.
There was an extent to the Romans tolerated customary law as a supplement to Roman law. However, there was no toleration of the law that was at variance with it, as Justinian's suppression of provincial law shows. Some of the practice of Volksrecht among semi-Romanized provincials may have been unintentional. Patricia Crone describes the situation in the Roman Near East as follows:
Volksrecht is not to be confused with vulgar law, a term used to refer to local evolutions from Roman legal institutions.