Human rights could also have been usefully explored in the context of Greek law's distinction between public and private law. Natural law is well presented, offering a degree of clarity that the philosophers would do well to emulate. But the normative efficacy of juristic opinion is not well handled, largely because notice is not taken of recent work on the ius respondendi . This is black- letter law at its darkest. This could have taken in areas that had a significant impact on the parameters of ownership, despite being virtually ignored in the legal texts.
Examples are agrarian reform and mandatory munera .
In the Gracchan period the head-on collision between the state's resumption of its property and the praetor's interdicts for the protection of possession raised acute constitutional and social issues. Also, the legal dodges used by the great possessors to give their rights a colour of ownership tell us more about dominium than is generally realised. Later on came mandatory munera , exemplified by the law saddling decurions with personal responsibility for shortfalls in tax collections. This munus was made an incident of ownership that could only be evaded by surrendering the property. Examples like these show that it was not only Lesser Real Rights that restricted the theoretically unfettered Roman dominium .