Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

would not help your case if you left the iudex thinking you were wasting time. Once the iudex had decided the case, there were no “higher” courts to appeal to, so his decision was final. The system as a whole seems to have been designed to work best as a state-sponsored form of arbitration. That is, it assumes a certain level of cooperation from both parties to resolve their dispute and a basic agreement that the mechanism is a legitimate one. For instance, the mechanisms to compel the defendant to appear in court in the first place or to execute a judgment at the end of the case were clumsy. Ultimately, the praetor could force cooperation, if nothing else worked, by granting a default judgment and backing it up by allowing the plaintiff to col lect by auctioning off the defendant’s property. Things worked much better if both parties preferred just to settle the issue by appealing to a neutral third party and move on. Less dramati cally, the system of constructing formulas lets both sides tell their story without having to settle any disputes up front, and the selection of the judge is easier if the two parties can reach agreement. So even when compulsion was an option, the sys tem made good use of cooperation.

Legis Actiones

The formulary procedure was the main one used during the period covered by this book, but it was not the only one. For

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