Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Delict

was being stolen. So, for instance, it was sometimes argued that if you took a single glass of wine from a cask, you had handled and therefore stolen the whole cask. By contrast, it was argued that you did not steal the cabinet you broke into to get at jew elry inside on the grounds that you didn’t have the intent to steal it. Frankly, these various definitions and the relationships among them were never entirely worked out. The specific damages awarded depended on a variety of circumstances. In the basic case, the thief had to pay double. There was a procedure that permitted a search of another’s property to look for stolen goods, and there was a triple pen alty if the goods were found in this way. Refusal of this search, theft by violence, and theft when the thief was caught in the act were penalized by quadruple payment. Note that the action on the delict would get you only this penalty payment in cash; a separate action would be required to get the actual object back. The whole system is problematic, at least in classic cases of theft, because professional thieves often fence property quickly and have few traceable assets. It does, however, still work to discourage embezzlement or repurposing. Still, under the Empire a criminal penalty was eventually developed.

Iniuria

This is perhaps the most complex of the delicts and almost cer tainly the one with the most complex evolution. The Twelve Tables made provisions for physical injury done to human

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