TEXT 8. Roman LaW: The law of succession

The law of succession is one of the most complex areas of Roman law. Any Roman citizen who was of age could make a will, but several very formal requirements had to be met for the will to be valid. The first requirement was the appointment of one or more heirs. An heir, in the Roman sense of the term, was a universal successor; that is, he took over the rights and duties of the deceased (insofar as they were transmissible at all) as a whole. On acceptance, the heir became owner if the deceased was owner, creditor if he was creditor and debtor if he was debtor, even though the assets were insufficient to pay the debts. It was thus possible for an inheritance to involve the heir in a loss. Until Justinian’s day this consequence could be avoided only by not accepting the inheritance, though certain categories of heirs could not refuse. Justinian made one of his most famous reforms by providing that an heir who made an inventory of the deceased’s assets need not pay out more than he had received. Freedom of testation, furthermore, was not complete: a man was obliged to leave a certain proportion of his property to his children and in some cases to ascendants and brothers and sisters.

With regard to intestate succession, or succession without a will, those first entitled in early times were the deceased’s own heirs - that is, those who were in his potestas or manus when he died and who were freed from that power at his death. Failing these heirs, the nearest agnatic relations (relations in the male line of descent) succeeded, and, if there were no agnates, the members of the gens, or clan, of the deceased succeeded. Later reforms placed children emancipated from potestas on an equal basis with those under potestas and gradually gave the surviving spouse (in marriage without manus) greater rights of succession. By Justinian’s day the system had evolved as follows: descendants had the first claim, and failing these heirs, came a composite class consisting of ascendants, brothers and sisters of full blood, and children of deceased brothers and sisters. Next came brothers and sisters of the half blood and, finally, the nearest cognates (relations in the female line). Husband and wife were not mentioned, but their old rights were kept alive in the absence of any of the preceding categories. Justinian also gave a “poor” widow a right to one-quarter of her husband’s estate unless there were more than three children, in which case she shared equally with them. If, however, the heirs were her own children by the deceased, she received only a ususfructus (life interest) in what she took.

The law of procedure

The earliest law suits (legis actiones) were conducted orally in two stages: a preliminary one before the jurisdictional magistrate, in which the issue was developed; and then the actual presentation of evidence to the judex, or judge. The first stage required that set forms of words be spoken by the parties and, sometimes, by the magistrate. The parties making an assertion of ownership, for instance, would grasp the thing in dispute and lay a wand on it, after which the magistrate would intervene and say, “Let go, both of you.” So formal was the procedure that a plaintiff who made the slightest mistake lost his case. For the second stage, before the judex, there were no formal rules. However, the plaintiff had the burden of proof, was responsible for physically producing the defendant in court and, often, for carrying out the sentence.

Under new procedures developed in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, the issue at the magisterial stage was formulated in written instructions to the judex, couched in the form of an alternative: “If it appears that the defendant owes the plaintiff 10,000 sesterces, the judex is to condemn the defendant to pay the plaintiff 10,000 sesterces; if it does not so appear, he is to absolve him.” A draft of these written instructions was probably prepared for the plaintiff before he came into court, but there could be no trial until it was accepted by the defendant, for there was always a contractual element about a lawsuit under both the new and the old systems. Pressure, however, could be exercised by the magistrate on a defendant who refused to accept instructions that the magistrate had approved, just as a plaintiff could be forced to alter instructions that the magistrate had disapproved, by the magistrate’s refusal to otherwise give the order to the judex to decide the case.

In late republican times, still another system developed, first in the provinces, then in Rome. Under the new system the magistrate used his administrative powers, which were always considerable, for the purpose of settling disputes He could command: thus if one person brought a complaint against another before him, he could investigate the matter and give the order he thought fit. As imperially appointed officers superseded republican magistrates, this administrative process became more common. The result was that the old contractual element in procedure disappeared as did the old two-stage division. Justice was now imposed from above by the state - not, as originally, left to a kind of voluntary arbitration supervised by the state.