Procedural Law of Ancient Rome in the Imperial Period

Abstract

The scientific study is devoted to the consideration of procedural law in ancient Rome during the reign of the kings. It is noted that scientific research is usually devoted to the problems of substantive law, both civil and family law, and procedural law and its institutions have been considered by legal scholars much less frequently. The article examines the governing bodies of the Roman State, namely, the People’s Assembly, the king (rex) and the Senate. It is noted that at any time the People's Assembly could remove the king from office, i.e. he cannot be called an absolute monarch. The king was a military commander, a priest, who dealt with the day-to-day management of the polis-state and acted as the supreme judge. The boundaries of the governing bodies of Ancient Rome, their competence and powers were established by custom. Customs were the first source of law in ancient Rome, which regulated relations within the family and community with the help of religious norms and social principles. Later, customs were recognised and enforced by the state. The collection of the most widespread and applied customs, the Laws of the XII Tables, was approved by the People's Assembly in 451–450 BC.

The study describes the procedural order of consideration of civil and criminal cases. It is determined that the Roman criminal procedure concerned only the quirits, which constituted a small number of Roman citizens. The second group of the population was made up of commoners – plebs, the third group of the Roman population was clientis, and the fourth – slaves. The subjects and allies of Rome, a huge mass of slaves, whose number was many times higher than the number of Roman citizens, were subject to trial in a simplified manner, and slaves were generally subject to extrajudicial proceedings.

The originality of the Roman procedural law of that time is examined, and it is concluded that it had many common general features with the legal process of the first, initial stage of the aristocratic republic, which is more fully and reliably known in science.