Definition
In Roman civil law, epistolæ were imperial rescripts — written opinions or decisions issued by the Roman emperor in response to legal questions or disputes submitted to him for resolution. When a party, magistrate, or official presented a case or posed a legal question directly to the emperor, the emperor's written reply took the form of an epistola. These replies carried the force of law and served as authoritative pronouncements on the legal questions addressed.
Epistolæ are one of the recognized categories of imperial constitutions in Roman law, alongside edicta (general edicts), decreta (judicial decisions in contested cases), and mandata (administrative instructions to officials).
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term in historical legal sources should understand that it refers to a specific mechanism of Roman imperial lawmaking, not to correspondence in any general sense. The term surfaces most commonly in works on Roman law, civil law foundations, and legal history rather than in common law sources.
The spelling varies across historical sources — epistolæ, epistolx (a typographical or OCR corruption of the ligature æ), and epistolae all appear depending on the edition and the digitization quality of the source. Researchers using Law Mind's digitized corpus should search multiple spellings to ensure complete retrieval, as the æ ligature is a frequent casualty of optical character recognition.
The practical significance of epistolæ in legal research is primarily doctrinal and historical: they are one of the formal channels through which Roman emperors shaped the Corpus Juris Civilis and, by extension, the civil law tradition that influenced continental European legal systems, canon law, and the mixed legal systems of Scotland, Louisiana, Quebec, and South Africa. A researcher tracing the origins of a civil law doctrine may find that its earliest authoritative statement takes the form of an imperial epistola.
Because Black's 2nd edition treats this term in a supplemental section, researchers should treat it as a term of art drawn from Roman and civil law scholarship rather than from Anglo-American practice. It will not appear in common law pleading or procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed., Supplemental) defines epistolæ simply as "rescripts; opinions given by the emperors in cases submitted to them for decision." This is accurate but compressed. The entry captures the essential character of epistolæ — responsive, written, imperial, and authoritative — without distinguishing epistolæ from the broader category of rescripts (rescripta), of which they are a subset.
The distinction worth noting: not all rescripts were epistolæ. A subscriptio was a rescript written on the original petition and returned to the petitioner; an epistola was a separate letter addressed to a magistrate or official. Historical legal dictionaries tend to collapse this distinction, treating rescript and epistola as near-synonyms. Researchers working on fine-grained questions of Roman law procedure should consult civil law treatises rather than relying on common law dictionary entries for this level of precision.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no operative meaning in Anglo-American common law. It appears in civil law jurisdictions and in scholarship on Roman law foundations. Researchers in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed jurisdictions may encounter the term in doctrinal history but will not find it in modern statutory or procedural sources.