Imperial Legislation

With the transformation of the Roman government into an absolute monarchy, all positive legislation, in the sense of formal law making, emanated directly from the emperor.

The rescripta, also referred to as leges speciales, were answers of the emperor to questions of law which had arisen in actual cases and which were submitted to him by private citizens or state officials.^[1134] In contrast with the leges generales, and unlike the position usually adopted during the Principate, they were not regarded as being generally binding. Thus, in 315 AD Emperor Constantine ordained that a rescriptum that deviated from an established lex generalis was invalid.^[1135] And according to a decree issued by Arcadius in 398 AD, a rescriptum was to be considered binding only in the individual case for which it had been issued.^[1136] However, in 426 AD, Emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III returned to the earlier position and decreed that, as it constituted a declaration of a general principle in an individual case, a rescriptum could, under certain conditions, be regarded as generally binding.^[1137] This view seems to have prevailed during the fifth and sixth centuries. Another type of imperial constitution, similar to the rescriptum, was the adnotatio, a decision of the emperor in response to a petition addressed to him written in the margin of the petition.^[1138] As both the rescriptum and the adnotatio served similar purposes, the distinction between the two gradually disappeared. As to the mandata^[1139] and the decreta,^[1140] these continued to be issued during this period, although not as often as during the Principate (the mandata were to a large extent superseded by the leges generales, while the decreta were replaced by the rescripta). The language of the majority of the imperial enactments of this period was Latin, but from the fifth century the number of those issued in Greek gradually increased.^[1141]