The Roman Law of Damage to Property: Being a Commentary On the Title of the Digest Ad Legem ... Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.
This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
PART II. SYSTEMATIC EXPOSITION OF THE ROMAN LAW DAMAGE TO PROPERTY. THE ROMAN LAW OF DAMAGE TO PROPERTY. § I. The date of the lex Aquilia In modern Roman law it is a general rule that a person who by his act unlawfully damages another man's property, is liable to pay compensation for the loss thus sustained, and it is well known that the lex Aquilia is the basis on which this rule is founded. This enactment, however, did not contain the general rule mentioned, but only provided for particular cases of damage done to property. We may safely assume that the earlier law on the same topic was of a yet more special character, but as our sources of information with regard to this question are very insufficient, a careful examination and consideration of the passages concerned are required. Before entering on this inquiry, which will be the object of § 2, it seems desirable, first of all, to consider separately a single point connected with the historical development of the law of damage to property, namely, the question as to the date of the issue of the Aquilian statute, which is itself a matter of some controversy. Upon this question we feel inclined to follow those authors who assign this lex to the year 467 A. u. c., for, although there is no direct testimony in our sources to prove this assertion, there are a good many circumstances which in their connection direct the investigator to that year 2. Ulpian in D. h.t. 1 pr. reports that the lex Aquilia has displaced (dero- gavit) all theprevious laws relating to damage to property: the XII Tables as well as the later laws on the topic. Accordingly the lex was issued at any rate some time after the Decemviral legislation (302-304 A. u. c.). Of course we cannot exactly say how much later it was published, but c...