study.4 Complex and subtle questions of conflicting rights and obligations had to be settled.
By contrast, criminal cases were seen as turning on mere questions of fact: "did he do it?" Indeed, in the earliest days of Rome there was almost no seperate body of criminal law. Criminal cases were brought by the victim, or a friend of the victim, as with civil wrongs.5 Much later, under the Empire, when Roman law began to jell into the forms in which we received it, criminal matters were settled, in large measure, by administrative authority of Imperial officials, not by the legal analysis of statutes and precedents.6 Thus, the ancient Roman legal commentators gave minimal attention to criminal law as a whole, let alone the specific questions raised by capital ________
3Hans Julius Wolff, Roman Law: A Historical Introduction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 54.
4Indeed, our term "civil law" comes from the Latin, and countries with legal systems rooted in Roman law are often called "c
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