Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Sources of Roman Law

looks much more complicated than that. Let us consider first the relationship between statute law and edicts, then the even more complicated issue of the “interpretation” of both. In some instances, it seems that edictal law exists only to implement statute law. So, for instance, the edict specifies the action to use in suing a thief. Theft was already recognized as an offense in statute law, but your property rights meant nothing in the Roman system if there was no specific action to defend them. (In fact, the Romans tended not even to talk about “rights” in the modern sense, just actions.) In other cases, the edict expanded the scope of already-existing statute law. For instance, legislation of the mid fifth century bc allowed suits to recover for bodily injury; the Edict eventually extended this protection to mere insult. In still others, the rules of the edict practically changed the statute law. (Technically, the old rules were not abolished. The praetor simply announced that he would make a new system available). The praetor effec tively changed the rules of inheritance by simply granting the right to sue for part of the estate to new classes of relatives (see Chapter 15). He could perhaps have been overruled in this by the passage of a new statute, but we have no examples of that happening. And finally, there were areas in which the praetor simply created the law out of whole cloth. The most notable of these was the creation of the binding consensual contract (Chapter 12). Both statute law and edicts were subject to interpretation by the jurists, and interpretation could have much the same range of effects on both that edicts could have on statute law.

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