Scholars conventionally treat the development of Roman law as having undergone three major phases: the Republic, the Principate, and the Dominate. The Republic (510 B.C.) represented the birth of codification and legal thought, and a period of limited direct participation by the people in the lawmaking process. Under the Principate (27 B.C.), the participation of the people was all but eliminated, in favor of the emperor's control over most of the state machinery. While the Principate emperors' absolutism was disguised behind a facade of Republicanism, the Dominate period (284 A.D.) saw no attempts to hide the fact of imperial totalitarianism.
The early Roman Republic was characterized by the "Struggle of the Orders," an ongoing cleavage between patricians and plebeians. Patricians enjoyed numerous advantages over plebeians, not only economically but socially and politically as well. A patrician creditor was all but guaranteed victory in any legal dispute with his plebeian debtor, by virtue of the fact that all magistrates were of the patrician class (Wolff 57). Most Romans were not aware of their rights under the law, nor indeed of the specific provisions of the law, as the law was kept in the custody of the College of Pontiffs, another patrician body (Hunter 8).
The Twelve Tables (circa 451 B.C.), a list of laws inscribed on bronze plaques, are believed to have been the first true Roman legislation (Wolff 55), and grew out of the plebeians' demand to know their rights and the laws they lived under. Its provisions are mainly procedural, stating for example that "[a]fter midday, the cause shall be adjudged to the party present [in a lawsuit] if the other has failed to appear" (Wigmore 375). The fact that this code was not moral in nature, like the Ten Commandments, demonstrates departure from the conception of law as merely an aspect of religious duty, and commencement of legal thought as a distinct field in itself.
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