Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Sources of Roman Law

modern Constitution), decrees of the Senate ( senatus consulta [sing. consultum ] – recall that the Senate of the Republic could not make laws), and “responses” to individual appeals and petitions were all ways of enacting the emperor’s will (though the details were presumably the work of professionals on his staff). There had been rule by executive order even during the Republic. These decrees came not from bureaucratic agencies, as they do today, but from the various elected magistrates, par ticularly provincial governors, the aediles, and (most important) the praetors. These orders are called “edicts,” from their Latin name, which means something spoken out loud. Originally, these presumably were spoken orders directed at some imme diate audience (say, ordering a crowd to disperse or a man to hand over a disputed piece of property). By recorded times, however, edicts had generally come to be written orders bind ing on the general public. In principle, they were valid only for the magistrate’s year in office. Romans spoke of these edicts as “supplementing” the statute law (say, by filling in gaps or sim ply by adding mechanisms of enforcement), but we will see in the final section of this chapter that the relationship between the two was more complicated than that. Once emperors started issuing decrees of lasting validity, the traditional type of edict became much less important (but see the following section on the edict of the urban praetor). Statute law was written to be general law, just as most laws are today, and many edicts had equally broad applications. But it is impossible for the writers of legislation (now or then) to foresee exactly how their law might apply to every real-world

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