The Decline of Popular Law-Making
After the establishment of the Principate, the assemblies of the people continued to operate. However, their significance as constitutional organs was greatly diminished as the laws they enacted were all part of imperial policy and expressed the emperor’s will.
Abiding by a tradition that accepted comitial enactment as the exclusive source of legislation, Augustus used the assemblies to procure the enactment of several important laws. Some of these laws were passed directly on the emperor’s motion while others were passed on the motion of higher magistrates, though obviously the emperor was their real promoter. In this way, statutes were passed concerning legal procedure (leges Iuliae iudiciorum publicorum et privatorum)[148]; marriage and divorce (lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, lex Papia Poppaea)[149] [150]; adultery (lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis)"; the repression of electoral corruption (lex Iulia de ambitu)[151]; and the operation of the senate (lex Iulia de senato habendo).[152] Other noteworthy enactments of this period were the lex Fufia Caninia (2 bc) and the lex Aelia Sentia (ad 4) that introduced restrictions on the testamentary manumission of slaves; and the lex Claudia de tutela mulierum, a law passed under Emperor Claudius, that abolished agnatic tutelage over women.[153]However, almost since the emergence of the new order, popular legislation was destined to wither away. It succumbed to the necessities of a community transformed from a city-state into a world empire, and a political system where the leadership shifted from short-term magistracies to the supremacy of a single ruler. As the political functions of the assemblies declined rapidly, this form of legislation soon became obsolete and ceased to exist at the end of the first century ad—the last known lex was an agrarian law passed in the time of Emperor Nerva (ad 96-98).[154]
2.4.2
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- Williamson C.. The laws of the Roman people: public law in the expansion and decline of the Roman Republic. University of Michigan,2005. — 535 p., 2005
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