Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

can prove ownership, and at this point the general nature of its claim (“I am the owner”) becomes an advantage.

The Actio Publiciana

Another procedure was introduced in the mid first century bc to try to reduce the importance of formalities in property transfer. This was called the actio Publiciana . It was a modi fied version of the vindicatio procedure, but it operated with the fiction that the would-be owner had held on to the object long enough for usucapio to take place. This entirely eliminated the short-term problem of the buyer-who-was-not-yet-owner. Now, this was not a perfect solution, since the time lapse built into the idea of usucapio was not entirely pointless in origin. It made problems easier to fix when something went substan tively wrong in a transaction. Say, for instance, I sell you a disputed parcel of land, but the person with a competing claim does not realize this until after the original sale. Thus the intro duction of the actio Publiciana gained greater efficiency at the cost of making bad transactions slightly more likely.

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