De rechtspraakverzamelingen van Julius Paulus : recht en rechtvaardigheid in de rechterlijke uitspraken van keizer Septimius Severus

Scattered throughout the Digest of Justinian are 38 reports of court cases judged by the emperor Septimius Severus (193-211 CE) in the quality of highest judicial instance in the Roman empire. These reports have been excerpted out of what seem to be two different works of the Roman jurist Julius Paulus: the Decretorum libri tres and the Imperialium sententiarum in cognitionibus prolatarum libri sex. Paul’s collections are unique. No other Roman jurist has ever published a similar collection of imperial judicial decisions. Moreover, Paul’s descriptions are exceptionally detailed. Not only does he describe the proceedings at the imperial court, but he also mentions the deliberations between the emperor and his advisory council afterwards. Consequently, his reports offer a unique insight in the decision making-process at the highest level of the imperial bureaucracy. The aim of this study is to gain a better perspective on the judicial activities of Septimius Severus by means of a legal and contextual analysis of Paul’s case reports and to relate these activities to the constitutional, institutional and historical context in which the judgments of Severus and, subsequently, the works of Paul came into being. This examination of the interaction between content and context makes it possible to discover the motives underlying Paul’s publication of the judicial decisions of Severus.