UNA GIUSTIZIA PERSONALIZZATA. I TRIBUNALI CIVILI DI ROMA NEL XVII SECOLO

When dealing with legal procedure, law historians have usually stressed the importance of the judge's position, contrasting, for example, professional and lay judges, examining the thoroughly different role they played or whether an adversarial, rather than an inquisitorial procedure was adopted. Historians of judicial litigation, instead, have emphasised the crucial significance of the law of evidence. A turning point was consequently ascribed to the 1566 Ordonnances de Moulins, that sanctioned the «lettres passent tûmoins» principle; thus, marking the shift from legal action between the plaintiff and the defendant based on orality and immediate confrontation to a lawsuit based on written documents and the active inquisitorial role of the judge. Relying on data from the two main civil courts of seventeenth-century Rome, this article shows how a difference in the legal procedure adopted by the two did not result in a similar difference in trial results. In the adversarial, as well as in the inquisitorial approach, the two parties became protagonists. The collection of evidence turned into a confrontation between parties, rather than in a scientific investigation for truth by the court. The two parties could also choose whether to continue action until a verdict was given or to abandon the lawsuit and select private means to settle their dispute. The second solution was usually preferred. The author then argues that the task so assigned to the court is better understood as that of a certifying notary rather than that of a judge passing a verdict.