Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

can be put into the same three general categories: “statute” law (law enacted by a legislative body), administrative rules, and judicial interpretation. This section will outline the Roman versions of these three types, noting changes in them tied to the transformations of the Roman government. I will point out similarities to and differences from modern practice. The next section will look at how the different sources interacted with each other. Roman statute law during the Republic came from votes of the popular assemblies. The resulting laws were called gener ally leges (sing. lex ); this is where our word “legal” comes from. (You may occasionally also see the term plebis scita [sing. plebis scitum ], but the difference is only procedural; it does not affect the force of the law.) Unlike the American system, though more like the British, there was no separate Constitution or other kind of special super-law. The rules of government could in theory be changed by the same majority vote it would take to build public works, change tax rates, or increase the penalty for some crime. Rome’s first written legal code was a collection of leges called collectively the Twelve Tables, dating to about 450 bc. Many of these laws remained on the books, at least formally, through the whole history of Rome. Under the Empire, some laws were still passed by the assemblies (though always with the approval of the emperor), but increasingly the emperor came to rule by issuing orders. As in the Republic, these laws could take on somewhat different names depending on the precise way in which they were created, but all just amounted to imperial decrees: “con stitutions” ( just an imperial order, not to be confused with a

26