Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Sources of Roman Law

officials who could publish edicts was the city praetor of Rome, generally called the “urban praetor” after his Latin title. Much of Roman private law came from his edict (which was itself a collection of many edicts on various topics). Some major areas of law, such as contract and defamation, were governed almost entirely by this edict. When legal scholars speak simply of “the Edict,” they are referring to the edict of the urban praetor. We noted earlier that an edict was technically valid only so long as the magistrate issuing it was in office. This could have made for a very unstable legal situation, but in practice each urban praetor tended to re-enact all (or nearly all) of his predeces sor’s edict. When necessary, changes could be made without cumbersome legislative action, but generally the tradition was quite conservative. (The same traditional practice applied to the edicts of the other magistrates, at least in Rome, e.g., [4] .) 1 It did not take long for the emperors to remove even this small amount of discretion from the urban praetors. By about ad 130, the form of the Edict was declared fixed (though the emperors themselves retained the power to order changes). At the same time, there was no particular attempt to replace the Edict with imperial laws in other forms. Hence, the urban prae tor’s edict remained central to Roman law for centuries after individual praetors had ceased to have any power over the legal system. The content of the Edict mostly took the form of a list of “actions” the praetor would grant to plaintiffs. That is, it was

1 Numbers in boldface and square brackets refer to the collection of trans lated documents at the end of the book.

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