Along with contracts, the other significant branch of the law of obligations is that of delicts, i.e., private wrongs for which redress was provided by civil law.

Just as Roman lawyers did not develop a general theory of contracts, neither did they produce an elaborate doctrine of delicts. The Roman law of delicts consisted of a set of reprehensible behaviors (e.g., theft, injury, wrongful loss) that were originally punished under civil law with a fine, compensation for the loss and damages, or both.

Although delicts and crimes both incurred punishment, they were essen­tially distinct. Crimes fell within the province of public law, while delicts fell within private law. Crimes were major offenses (e.g., treason, murder, and sacral wrongs, among others) punishable by a public penalty following con­viction in a special court. In contrast to delicts, crimes usually implied offense against the entire community, not simply harm to particular interests; liability for delicts could not be canceled by informal agreement (pactum). Modern lawyers can learn more from the law of delicts than from Roman criminal law because Roman jurists did not develop criminal law as fully. Indeed, legal literature did not begin to pay significant attention to crime until the second century CE.

In early law, redress for delicts consisted of delivering the body of the wrongdoer into the hands of his victim. This penal character of redress explains many particularities of the law governing delicts as opposed to con­tracts - for instance, the fact that the death of the wrongdoer ended liability for the delict. Proceedings against the wrongdoer’s heir were accepted under praetorian law only when the heir had derived some benefit from the wrong. Another important reason for the essentially punitive character of the law of delicts was that the guilty wrongdoers were viewed as acting with intent to defraud (dolus).

The law of delicts progressed from enabling a victim to exact personal revenge, to requiring an agreement for satisfaction. Revenge thus became redeemable, and it was gradually transformed into a claim for monetary compensation or compulsory payment of a fine. In these cases, the victim had to abstain from revenge by accepting a compensation paid by the wrongdoer or his relatives. The amount to be paid in redress was sometimes prescribed directly by statutory law and sometimes decided by the judge in his discretion.

By the time of classical law, the Roman law of delicts and compensations was solidly established as a form of civil proceedings imposing penalties for wrongdoers. More than twenty delicts were known to the Romans in the early Principate. Among these twenty, theft in the broader sense furtum), injury (iniuria), and wrongful loss (damnum iniuria datum) were probably the most important civil delicts, and fraud (dolus) and duress (metus), the most significant praetorian delicts. This chapter will address only these categories.