Like many pre-modern empires the Roman Empire did not impose their legal regime upon conquering new territories; rather, Romans dominated new territories and peoples through the formation of tributary-allliances, which either allowed for the continuation of local legal regimes or allowed for some privileged elites in conquered territory to receive Roman citizenship. Thus, over the course of the Empire’s expansion a peculiar form of legal pluralism emerged, in which a person could have multiple recognized legal identities based on ethnic identity, linguistic affiliation, citizenship status, religion, and even occupation (In traditional scholarship such arrangements are usually termed “laws of person”). Recent scholarship on Roman legal culture, taking cues from studies of colonial and post-colonial legal cultures, has come to appreciate not only that legal pluralism is an effective means for domination, but is also a vehicle through which “colonized” individuals can exploit the inconsistencies between legal regimes to their advantage. They may, for instance, “forum shop” for judgments to their benefit or construct legal spaces that draw legitimacy from both the colonizer’s legal culture and from indigenous legal elements. Over the past few years, I have been contemplating the interlocking though often contradictory operation of the Roman legal system with an eye towards how Roman jurists and litigants themselves theorized the relationships between independent and overlapping juridical spheres. My interests particularly lie in how the theorization of Roman legal pluralism shaped the development of Christian legal discourses and practices. Historians have typically eschewed the label “church law” for early Christian juridical practices and texts before the medieval codification(s) of Christian legal texts. They have instead preferred to speak of Christian “customs” and “conflict resolution mechanisms” for these un-codified legal regimes within Christian communities. Roman jurists, however, made little distinction between what we might label “custom” and “law.” Further, as research on European colonial projects has shown, the distinction is largely a legal product of colonial expansion. My general questions are: 1) May we speak of “church law” before the rise of institutional churches in the middle ages? 2) Did ancient Christian authors, many of which had legal training, conceptualize “church law” along the same lines of ethnic and municipal laws operating under the broad overarching category Roman imperial law 3) Might our understanding of regional variation in Christian legal practices and discourses be enhanced by the intellectual paradigm of legal pluralism.