The Consolidation of Magisterial Law
After the establishment of the Principate, Roman law still comprised the ius civile and the ius honorarium: the original core of the civil law and the law derived from the edicts of the jurisdictional magistrates (especially the praetors).
However, since the inception of this period the productive strength of the magisterial edict started to weaken. As the republican magistrates’ authority faded away and their cardinal functions were increasingly assumed by the emperor and his officials, magisterial initiatives became increasingly rare and the magistrates’ right to alter the edicts on their own authority eroded. Any changes made in the edicts largely embraced measures introduced by other law-making agencies (leges or senatus consulta). Finally, pursuant to Emperor Hadrian’s orders in the early second century ad the permanent edict of the praetors and the aediles was recast, unified and updated by the jurist Salvius lulianus (probably during the latter’s praetorship). The codified edict was ratified by a senatus consultum in ad 130 and thereafter magistrates were bound to administer justice in individual cases exclusively on the basis of the reformulated edict.[155] Although edicts were still annually issued by magistrates, the latter had no control over their content. For all practical purposes, the edictum perpetuum thus evolved as established law; any further necessary changes had to be initiated by imperial enactment.[156]Although the magisterial edict was no longer a source of new law, for a long period it was still regarded as an important source of law for legal practice. Moreover, the distinction between ius civile and ius honorarium persevered as long as the judicial system allied to these bodies of law still operated. As new forms of dispensing justice gradually replaced the republican system of legal procedure, the distinction between the two bodies of law (existing as one of form rather than substance) was obliterated. The fusion of ius civile and ius honorarium was also precipitated by the Roman jurists who gradually removed the boundaries by developing both masses of law in common. In the later imperial era the resultant combination of these two sources of law was designated ius, in contradistinction to the body of rules derived from imperial legislation known as lex.
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