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1. Introduction

Public law is, as Ulpian put it, the law quod ad statum rei Romanae spectat, ‘which regards the state of the Roman commonwealth’. It therefore covers everything that does not concern the affairs of individual citizens: what we now call constitutional, criminal, and admi­nistrative law.

This chapter does not cover the substance of criminal law.1 It is concerned with ‘public’ law, meaning constitutional as well as administrative law, both at the level of the empire and at the local level. It considers the formal elements of public law in the pre-imperial period, and the formal and substantive elements of public law during the imperial period, as well as further changes made under Diocletian and up to the end of the fifth century AD.

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Source: Johnson David (ed). The Cambridge companion to Roman Law. Cambridge University Press,2015. — 554 p.. 2015
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