and their statutory definition was so difficult and indeed impossible, that the administration of justice under these categories from its very nature bore almost inevitably the stamp of arbitrariness.  And now when the very idea of right had become obscured amidst the struggles of the orders, and when the legal party—­leaders on both sides were furnished with a co-ordinate jurisdiction, this jurisdiction must have more and more approximated to a mere arbitrary police.  It affected in particular the magistrate.  Hitherto the latter according to Roman state law, so long as he was a magistrate, was amenable to no jurisdiction at all, and, although after demitting his office he might have been legally made responsible for each of his acts, the exercise of this right lay withal in the hands of the members of his own order and ultimately of the collective community, to which these likewise belonged.  Now in the tribunician jurisdiction there emerged a new power, which on the one hand might interfere against the supreme magistrate even during his tenure of office, and on the other hand was wielded against the noble burgesses exclusively by the non-noble, and which was the more oppressive that neither the crime nor its punishment was formally defined by law.  In reality through the co-ordinate jurisdiction of the plebs and the community the estates, limbs, and lives of the burgesses were abandoned to the arbitrary pleasure of the party assemblies.

In civil jurisdiction the plebeian institutions interfered only so far, that in the processes affecting freedom, which were so important for the plebs, the nomination of jurymen was withdrawn from the consuls, and the decisions in such cases were pronounced by the “ten-men-judges” destined specially for that purpose (-iudices-, -decemviri-, afterwards -decemviri litibus iudicandis-).

Legislation

With this co-ordinate jurisdiction there was further associated a co-ordinate initiative in legislation.  The right of assembling the members and of procuring decrees on their part already pertained to the tribunes, in so far as no association at all can be conceived without such a right.  But it was conferred upon them, in a marked way, by legally securing that the autonomous right of the plebs to assemble and pass resolutions should not be interfered with on the part of the magistrates of the community or, in fact, of the community itself.  At all events it was the necessary preliminary to the legal recognition of the plebs generally, that the tribunes could not be hindered from having their successors elected by the assembly of the plebs and from procuring the confirmation of their criminal sentences by the same body; and this right accordingly was further specially guaranteed to them by the Icilian law (262), which threatened with severe punishment any one who should interrupt the tribune while speaking, or should bid the assembly disperse.  It is evident that under such circumstances