Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

urban praetor) because his lot did not come up. Thus it was not in the interest of elites to promote an emphasis on credential ing in any profession. Moreover, members of this elite class did not depend on any profession to make a living; they had inherited wealth. Picking one job or another would tie them down unnecessarily. Thus, on the one hand, advocates were not required to be legal experts (and vice versa), but, on the other, there were no institutions to prevent a given person from entering both arenas. The normal Latin word for an advocate (at least on the defen dant’s side) was “patron,” a term that carried much broader social implications. A patron (the word comes from the word for “father”) was a social superior who was supposed to look out for a set of social inferiors (“clients”), who were in turn loyal to and supportive of him. In principle, this relationship should be long-standing and inclusive of many activities: advice (both legal and practical), gift giving, access to persons of different social ranks. In this context, the patron would be more likely to have access to legal knowledge than his clients, both by virtue of better general education and by being part of or connected to the governmental apparatus. Still, the most important thing a patron brought to a case might well be his personal author ity rather than his specific legal knowledge. If authority and knowledge became somewhat confused with each other, that worked to the patron’s advantage. It personalized something (legal expertise) that could otherwise be seen as an unfairly distributed resource. Also, the practice differed somewhat from the principle, at least by the later Republic. While defense

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