Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

not framed in terms of general legal rights or principles. Rather, it specified the remedies that would be available in many par ticular situations. A more detailed discussion of these actions will be found in Chapter 11, but a few words may be in order here. In some cases, the Edict just specified the circumstances in which the praetor would grant a trial (in modern terms, various “causes of action”). In other cases, he specified the “formulae” that could actually be used in those circumstances – directions to judges on how to decide various kinds of cases. There were also standard orders the praetor might issue himself. These included simple commands, for example, requiring a builder to give insurance against damage to neighboring property, pre requisites to being allowed to initiate a suit, or a conditional command called an “interdict” (e.g., to restore possession of an item [if] taken by force; see also Chapter 13 on the law of prop erty). He could also decree a restitutio in integrum , a decree that nullified some pre-existing transaction.

Relationship between Sources

In the American system, decrees (say, the rules of federal agen cies) and precedent/interpretation are generally meant to be subordinate to statute law. Romans sometimes speak as if they imagined a similar hierarchy; one lawyer said that the edicts were meant to “assist, supplement, and correct” the core of the statute law, what they sometimes called the ius civile , lumping together all statute law, regardless of source. But actual practice

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