Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Civil Procedure

had not existed under either of the earlier systems. In principle, a case could go all the way to the emperor, and his responses to such cases would become a significant source of law. Appeals typically only went up the ladder, unlike those in modern sys tems, where a higher court often returns a case to a lower one with instructions to reconsider some specific issue. Procedures of this general sort seem already to have existed during the Republic in the provinces, where Roman governors (essentially military governors) could impose them on nonciti zen subjects. Under the empire they quickly became normal in that context, and also started to be used in Rome for cases involving newly formalized legal institutions, such as the fidei commissum (a trust created by will; see Chapter 15). By per haps the mid third century ad, however, the new procedure seems to have become the dominant one even for old areas of the law.

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