## Facts

- Aulus Caecina claimed entitlement to his late wife’s estate, which included a farm property.
- Sextus Aebutius claimed the farm belonged to him, not to the estate Caecina asserted rights to.
- When Caecina attempted to enter the farm, Aebutius, together with armed neighbors, prevented Caecina from entering.
- Caecina returned to Rome and sought an interdict (an injunction-like praetorian remedy) from the Urban Praetor based on Aebutius’s use of armed force to keep him off the property.
- The Urban Praetor appointed a panel of *recuperatores* (lay adjudicators) to hear and determine the dispute.
- The main controversy before the panel centered on a legal question: how to interpret entitlement to the interdict for *vis armata* (armed force).
- In a notable procedural move, Caecina’s advocate, Cicero, introduced jurists’ *responsa* (formal statements of law/opinion) to guide the panel’s interpretation of the interdict.

## Issues

1. Does the interdict concerning *vis armata* protect a claimant who is kept from entering land by armed force, or only someone who has already entered and is then forcibly expelled?
2. What role should jurists’ *responsa* play in a proceeding before lay *recuperatores* when the dispute turns on interpreting a praetorian remedy?

## Decision

- No modern-style judicial opinion survives; the episode is reconstructed from Cicero’s *Pro Caecina* and analyzed by Frier as evidence about late-Republican adjudication.
- The Urban Praetor did not finally resolve the legal meaning of the interdict himself; instead, he referred the matter to *recuperatores* to decide whether Caecina’s situation fell within the interdict’s protection.
- Cicero pressed the panel to treat the interpretation of the interdict as a technical question of law and to accept juristic *responsa* as the best statement of that law for deciding the case.

## Legal Principles

- An interdict addressing *vis armata* raised a threshold interpretive question: whether armed exclusion from entry could qualify, or whether the remedy required a completed physical ejection.
- In late-Republican private adjudication, legal interpretation could be shaped by advocacy, but Cicero’s use of jurists’ *responsa* shows an attempt to separate “law” from case-by-case lay judgment.
- Jurists’ *responsa* were not formally binding on lay adjudicators, yet Cicero’s strategy (as presented by Frier) sought to make them functionally controlling by portraying them as the proper source for determining legal meaning.
- The episode illustrates an emerging claim that law should be treated as a distinct body of norms articulated by jurists and applied in court, rather than being left primarily to the discretionary moral sense of lay decision-makers.

## Conclusion

As reconstructed in Frier’s account of Cicero’s *Pro Caecina*, Caecina v. Aebutius is less a reported “holding” than a window into Roman procedure: an inheritance-related land dispute in which armed exclusion triggered a request for an interdict, and Cicero’s unusual reliance on jurists’ *responsa* framed the case as a contest over who determines legal meaning—lay adjudicators applying common judgment or jurists supplying authoritative statements of law.


Caecina v. Aebutius, Bruce W. Frier, Autonomy of Law and the Origins of the Legal Profession, 11 Cardozo Law Rev. 259, 262-266 (1989)