Suchergebnisse

Summary
The prohibition of double trial for one and the same fact is a principle that we find theorized and applied in the legal experience of the Romans above all in the field of civil procedural law. Hence modern Romanistic legal science concentrated on this area of law. There are only few specific studies devoted to this subject with reference to criminal procedural law. The problem deserves to be taken up and studied in depth. First of all the author defines the scope of the preclusive effects produced by the judgement as it results from an exhaustive analysis of the epigraphic Lex repetundarum (linn. 1–4, 5, 56). On a more general level, the sources show that the principle of the non-repeatability of criminal prosecutions found substantial application both in the late republican and imperial ages, albeit with the limits and the exceptions that the author highlights. In addition to jurisprudence, the subject of the unrepeatability of the trial lent itself to being dealt with in schools of rhetoric.

Abstract

The Principle of the Irretroactivity of the Law in the Roman Legal Experience in the Republican Age. Through an in-depth analysis of literary and legal sources (primarily Cicero) and of epigraphic evidence, the author demonstrates that the principle of the law's non-retroactivity was known to, and applied by, the Romans since the Republican age. The political struggle favored on several occasions the violation of this principle by imposing an extraordinary criminal legislation, aimed at sanctioning past behaviors of adversaries. But, although with undeniable limits of effectiveness in the dynamic relationship with the retroactivity, the author acknowledges that at the end of the first century BC non-retroactivity appeared as the dominant principle, consolidated both in the field of the civil law as well as substantive criminal law.