in form of law, and was after the legal recognition of the tribunate
of the plebs regarded as lawfully admissible.

In point of intention this new jurisdiction of the tribunes and the
aediles, and the appellate decision of the plebeian assembly therein
originating, were beyond doubt just as much bound to the laws as the
jurisdiction of the consuls and quaestors and the judgment of the
centuries on appeal; the legal conceptions of crime against the
community(5) and of offences against order(6) were transferred from
the community and its magistrates to the plebs and its champions.
But these conceptions were themselves so little fixed, 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