I conclude the book by discussing how later historians used Roman law to imagine legal orders that were more appealing than their own conditions. I use two examples: Bracton, whose treatise on English law used Roman concepts to aggrandize jurists like himself within the legal system of the thirteenth century, and Fritz Schulz, a refugee from Nazi Germany whose writings imagined a Roman rule of law as an implicit counterpoint to the totalitarianism he had fled. I finally argue that this rhetorical feature of Roman law is not unique to the Roman context, but instead reflects a broader aspirational tendency in legal writing and historiography.