Bill of pains and penalties
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
Privilegium · bill of pains and penalties · private law · privilegium
in the texts
Institutes of Roman Law
Acquisition by a private, individual grant of the sovereign, distinguished from acquisition under a general law and title.
The acquisition of a right by immediate grant from the sovereign (private act of the legislature, private act of parliament) is unlike the acquisition of a person entitled under some general disposition of a universal law.
It may assist to clear our conception of title if we observe that the title ‘Lege’ is ambiguous, and that (1) while one of its meanings implies an absence of all title, (2) another denotes a miscellaneous group of heterogeneous titles.
Whenever there is a genuine title and a general law, the title is interposed between the general right or duty and the particular person therewith invested, just as the middle term is interposed between the major and minor terms of a syllogism.
Ancient Law
The archaic procedural form in which the legislature punished an individual by special enactment.
Nothing, I have said, can be simpler than the considerations which ultimately led ancient societies to the formation of a true criminal jurisprudence.
One immediate result was that the Comitia continued to exercise criminal jurisdiction by way of bill of pains and penalties, long after the Quæstiones had been established.
Every indictment therefore took the form of a bill of pains and penalties, and the trial of a criminal was a proceeding wholly extraordinary, wholly irregular, wholly independent of settled rules and fixed conditions.