Roman Law - Ancient Rome

Roman laws covered all aspects of daily life. They were concerned with crime and punishment, land and property ownership, trade, maritime and agricultural industries, citizenship, sexuality and prostitution, slavery and manumission, politics, liability and destruction of property, and peacekeeping. We can study these laws today, thanks to ancient legal texts, literature, papyrus, wax tablets, and inscriptions.

Roman Law was established through a variety of instruments, such as statutes, magistrates' decrees, emperor's edicts, senatorial decrees, parliamentary votes, plebiscite, and expert counsel's deliberations, and thus was versatile and versatile to deal with changing situations, from Republican politics to imperial politics, from local to national commerce and from state to interstate. has become as flexible as politics.

Historical Sources

One of the most important sources on Roman law is the Corpus Juris Civilis, which was compiled under the auspices of Justinian I and covers civil law as the name suggests. One of his four books, the massive Digest, covered all aspects of public and private law. The abstract was created under Tribonian supervision in AD 533 and is an overview of nearly 2000 separate legal volumes. These original sources were written by prominent jurists or legal experts such as Gaius, Ulpian, and Paul, and they sum up one of the richest surviving texts from antiquity, as they are a treasure trove of incidental historical information used to illustrate points of law ranging from life expectancy to tax figures.

Other law collections include the 3rd century Codex Gregorianus (AD 292) and Codex Hermogenianus (AD 295), both named after prominent jurists under Diocletian and collectively containing more than 2,500 texts. There is also the Theodosian law, a collection of more than 2,700 laws compiled around 430 AD and added in subsequent years, and finally the Codex Justinian (528-534 AD), which summarizes and expands on the older laws.

In addition, there are certain types of legal documents that have survived from antiquity, such as negotiation documents that describe any business transaction, from leases and lease agreements to contracts summarizing the transfer of property. Inscriptions can also reveal laws and their effects, as placed on public monuments where they proclaim new laws or give thanks for court victories to those who helped the party involved.

In practice, lawsuits were often avoided due to the opposing parties taking an oath or bylaw oath, but if such a solution could not be reached, legal proceedings were followed by the plaintiff's summoning the defendant to court (civil actions: udicia publica or for criminal law: quaestiones). The first step in most civil cases is for the parties involved to go to a magistrate who determines the legal issue at hand and either dismisses the case as a matter of legal intervention (denegatio actiomis) or nominates an official (Iudex datus) to hear and hear the case. When both parties accepted the magistrate's assessment, the case would be heard before Iudex, who made a decision on behalf of the state. The defendant and the plaintiff had to represent themselves at the hearing as there was no legal representation system. If the defendant lost a civil action, there was a reprimand and they had to pay an amount of money (litis aestimatio), usually agreed upon by the ria, which could cover the original value of the goods or the damages done to the plaintiff.

Penalties for crimes were considered deterrent rather than corrective, and included fines (multae), imprisonment, caste, seizure of property, loss of citizenship, exile, forced labor, or the death penalty (poena capitis). Penalties could also differ depending on the defendant's status and whether he was a man, woman, or slave. Perhaps not surprisingly, men of higher social status generally received milder punishments. The severity of the punishment could also depend on factors such as preplanning, provocation, frequency, and the influence of alcohol.

In many cases, particularly in civil cases, heirs may have to stand in the place of the original defendant if the defendant died before the lawsuit was completed. There was no real appeal in Roman law in the republic, but under the empire discontented parties could appeal to the emperor or high official and the original decision could be overturned or reversed. However, any objection that was not well-founded could be punished.

Perhaps this was one of the greatest benefits of Roman law and legal systems, that as the empire grew and the population acted as a binding force on communities, citizens became more diverse, law and protection grew, and over time a citizen's rights (not even civil rights) had changed a pattern of wrongdoing. created an expectation that a system would be upheld. In addition, the Romans conveyed to us not only many legal terms still used today in the field of law and legal science, but also their passion and expertise for precise and precise legal terminology to avoid ambiguity or even misinterpretation of the law.