I’m a law student in a civil law country. As part of my curriculum I have to study Roman law, I actually really enjoy it, but whenever I’ve researched I run into texts written by English speaking academics and I find that they’re just weird or wrong. They almost always cite legal texts instead of jurists and present roman law as this weird thing that doesn’t even resemble the legal roman tradition. What they write sometimes contradicts authors like Alvaro d’ors or Juan Iglesias who are widely considered the top scholars of roman law in history.
It seems to me that there’s a huge difference between how common law countries (UK, US, Canada, etc) and civil law countries view Roman law, it seems to me that English speaking historians avoid consulting legal scholars that follow the roman legal tradition and they end up making this weird amalgamation of romanised common law thing.
Can I ( or we ) get specific examples of what you have in mind ( authors & works and pages ), otherwise we are in the blind here, usually blanket unsubstantiated dismissal here is not welcoming.
Edit; if you want me to try to address some of these reservations, /u/notnotavirginnot, you will have to give me some specifics to work with. But trivially, a difference can be seen about legal scholarship on Roman law, and historical scholarship on Roman law, since they are generally interested in different things, have different methodologies ( interests in legal reasoning, for example ), different questions, et all. and while there might some significant overlap - to expand on this, a legal book on Roman property law will differ significantly from historical account of Roman property, and so forth. And all this brings with some other notable differences, namely, historical scholarhip of Roman period has progressed significantly in the last half a century, while anyone familiar with classical legal scholarship on Roman law knows that majority of material and texbooks, still in use, ( although most of them have gone through revisions ), are from later half of the twentieth century.
This is a complex question with a multifaceted answer, sadly, the framing of the issue as presented in the post has crippled any possible civil conversation on the matter why legal history ( in law faculties ) is somewhat different, but not isolated, from history in history departments in relation to legal influence to broader questions. Now, this has sparked some interest in me, and I will definitely be doing some research in the near future for accounts of these differences, and if there exist studies about this phenomena, beside some trivial observations already mentioned.