The position in modern law

Both senatus consultum Vellaeanum and Authentica si qua mulier appear to be somewhat out of tune with modern notions about equality of the sexes. As Van den Heever J once put it when faced with the necessity of applying these legal fossils in the 20th century:

"One of the incongruities of this inconsequent age is the fact that women while enjoying full rights of citizenship, including that of making or marring policies of the State as effectively as any male, are able in their private affairs to invoke a defence based on their innate fecklessness and incapacity and so avoid liability in respect of obligations which they have deliberately assumed."²⁵⁷

Yet it took almost another 30 years before this part of the Roman-Dutch common law was repealed in South Africa (by legislation),^[803] as it had already been in the other countries of the ius commune tradition (in France as early as 1606, in some J?arts of Germany only with the coming into operation of the BGB).^[804] Thus, today, the disputes enveloping the senatus consultum Vellaeanum have lost their practical relevance.^[805] Yet the enactment is still worth studying from a historical perspective, as it provides an important mosaic stone for the evaluation of the role of women in Roman society and of the way in which the Roman jurists applied and developed the law.