Benjamin Straumann is ERC professor of history at the University of Zurich and research professor of classics at New York University. He is also Alberico Gentili senior fellow at New York University School of Law. Benjamin is the author of Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’s Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), and of Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).