Francisci Hotomani iurisconsulti observationum liber IIII

A decorative initial letter A.The interpretation of civil law is an arduous, most difficult, and painstaking task. Even to those ancient iurisconsulti legal experts, who shed light on this discipline with their writings in a contest of skill—not only during the Republic but even after it was transferred to the rule of one man—it always seemed a most laborious endeavor. For one must dispute not only about the status and condition of persons, about covenants, about wills, about inheritances, about guardianships, about marriages, about divorces, and about the organization of lawsuits; but also about the senate, about magistrates, about imperial power, about jurisdiction, and about public revenues; in short, about all those things that are counted as parts of public law. But in this present age, we are forced to defend that name and office of the iurisconsultus legal expert with much greater labor and trouble. For those ancients had the laws, the edicts, and the S.C. Senatus Consultum; decree of the senate—upon whose meaning and interpretation they were building—intact. We, however, in part do not possess the very laws we are forced to interpret, and in part possess them only mutilated, torn, and truncated, like certain fragments of edicts and senatorial decrees from which we are forced to make a conjecture, not to say divine, their meaning.