Under Roman law women were able to lay charges and appear in court, but there were restrictions on the circumstances in which they could act both in civil and criminal law.
And if they were under tutela mulierum, they could not initiate legal action without their tutor's authorization [Rules of Ulpian 11.27, in Part III.A].
(They could, however, appoint a procurator to represent them without their tutor's permission; see Frag. Vat. 325, Part III.E.) The main feature of these restrictions is that underlying virtually all restrictions on women in Roman law: women could not represent others, only themselves [see Thomas 1992, 126—37].According to Jane Gardner, the origins of these restrictions lay in the highly patriarchal nature of early Roman society, where the male head of household (paterfamilias) not only had legal power (potestas) over his dependants, but also was responsible for representing their interests in the outside world. Law, like politics, was transacted between patresfamilias, and women, who never had potestas, could not be players in the legal or political world [Gardner 1993, 85—109]. Jurists of the imperial period, however, explained the restrictions on women's public roles as due to women's “weakness” or to the moral impropriety of a woman appearing in an active role in public [Part IV.C.1].