The jurists did not participate in administering the law, but rather focused on interpreting and generating formal opinions on the law. By the second half of the third century BCE, a new professional group of specialists trained in law, the jurists, emerged to meet this demand. This led to the development of the ius gentium ("law of nations"), which was the body of laws that applied to all people, and was based upon the common principles and reasoning that civilized societies and humankind were understood to share, and ius naturale ("natural law"), a category of law based on the principles shared by all living creatures, humans as well as animals (such as laws pertaining to procreation, or physical defense against attack).Īs law became more complex, Roman rulers found themselves in need of a larger group of legal authorities to give order to the system of legal formulas and decisions. Legal questions and disputes arose not only among Roman citizens, but with non-citizens living in or traveling through its territories, to whom the ius civile did not apply. The Jurists and the Evolution of the Roman Legal SystemĪs the Roman republic grew into an empire, its rulers faced the increasing challenge of governing an ever more diverse and far-flung population. Research the Twelve Tables and Compilations of Roman Law. The Twelve Tables touched on many areas of law, not only the civil law that applied directly to citizens, but also areas such as public law and religious law, which applied to larger social constructs and institutions.
The work they produced in 449 BCE, the Twelve Tables, documented the centuries-old customary laws and became the foundation of Roman law as we know it. Thus a committee of ten men called the decemvirs was established in 451 BCE to write down the law for the first time. Integral to the notion that this customary law was part of the fabric of early Roman culture was the fact that this law only applied to Roman citizens and was thus ius civile, or civil law.ĭuring a period of social unrest, when some Romans felt that legal decisions were being arbitrarily decided, a push was made to write down the law in order to better anticipate how decisions would be made.
This customary law ( ius, in Latin) was handed down through generations and was considered by the Romans to be an inherited aspect of their society as it had evolved from its earliest days. Law in Early Rome and the Republic Long before the Roman Republic was established in 509 BCE, the early Romans lived by laws developed through centuries of custom.
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