Definition
The Lex Cornelia de Injuriis was a Roman statute enacted under the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla approximately 81 B.C. that created a formal civil action — the actio injuriarum — for certain categories of bodily injury and personal violation. The law converted what had previously been a matter of private settlement or fixed tariff penalties under the Twelve Tables into an actionable civil wrong with a recoverable penalty.
The statute specifically addressed three recognized categories of wrongful conduct: physical beating or striking of a person (verberatio), flogging or scourging (pulsatio), and forcible entry into another's dwelling. By providing a dedicated civil remedy for these wrongs, the Lex Cornelia institutionalized the Roman law concept of injuria — a term encompassing unlawful interference with person, dignity, or rights — and expanded its practical reach beyond the older, formulaic penalties.
Common Confusion
The Lex Cornelia de Injuriis should not be confused with two other Sullan statutes bearing similar names. The Lex Cornelia de Falso (or Falsis) addressed forgery and counterfeiting — an entirely distinct subject. The Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficis dealt with homicide and poisoning. Burrill's entry on Lex Cornelia de Injuriis immediately follows with the entry on Lex Cornelia de Falso, creating an adjacent placement in historical dictionaries that can mislead a researcher scanning quickly. All three are Cornelian laws; none are interchangeable.
Separately, injuria as a Roman law concept is broader than the specific wrongs addressed by this statute. The Lex Cornelia de Injuriis covers only a subset of injuriae — the physical and trespassory categories. The fuller doctrine of injuria, including insults and affronts to dignity, developed through the praetorian edict independently of this lex.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term are most likely working in one of three contexts: Roman law survey texts, comparative legal history tracing the ancestry of tort and battery concepts, or historical common law sources that invoke Roman antecedents to explain English doctrine.
The principal research trap is treating the Lex Cornelia de Injuriis as the source of the entire Roman injuria doctrine. It is not. The praetorian actio injuriarum had an independent and more expansive development. When historical treatises cite this lex in discussions of personal wrongs, they are typically pointing to the crystallization of physical battery as a legal wrong — not to the full scope of Roman personality rights.
In common law research, citations to the Lex Cornelia de Injuriis tend to appear in early treatises and commentaries seeking Roman pedigree for assault and battery. These citations are more rhetorical than doctrinal — the common law did not inherit this statute directly. Researchers should treat such references as evidence of the author's learning and frame of reference rather than as a claim of direct legal lineage.
The statute's date (81 B.C.) and its Sullan authorship also carry political context that occasionally surfaces in Roman law scholarship: Sulla's legislative program was simultaneously a reform effort and a consolidation of aristocratic power, and the remedies provided by this lex reflect choices about who could access formal legal process.
Bouvier cites Sohm's Institutes of Roman Law (R. L. 329) for the civil penalty recovery framing. Burrill cites Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum and Hallifax's Analysis of the Civil Law. Researchers using either dictionary entry as a starting point should treat those underlying sources — not the dictionary entry itself — as the substantive authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Burrill agree on the core content: a Sullan statute creating civil remedies for physical injuries including battery and forcible entry. The entries are complementary rather than divergent.
Bouvier's entry is the more analytically precise of the two, distinguishing the actio injuriarum created by this lex from the broader Roman law treatment of injuria, and noting specifically that the action arose upon allegations of beating or scourging. The reference to Sohm grounds the entry in a serious Roman law authority.
Burrill's entry is briefer but adds the explicit reference to forcible entry into another's house as a covered wrong — a detail Bouvier mentions less directly. Burrill's placement of the entry immediately before Lex Cornelia de Falso, with no strong break, is the structural feature most likely to cause confusion in research.
Neither entry discusses the relationship between the Lex Cornelia de Injuriis and the earlier Twelve Tables provisions on injuria, which is a significant omission for anyone trying to understand the statute's historical significance as a reform rather than an originating enactment. Historical dictionaries of this period generally do not engage with the legislative history of Roman statutes at that level of granularity, and researchers should not expect them to.
Jurisdictional Note
This is a Roman law term with no direct application in any modern common law jurisdiction. It appears in American and English legal dictionaries primarily as a reference term for understanding the Roman antecedents of personal injury and trespass doctrine. Civil law jurisdictions retain Roman law vocabulary more directly, but the Lex Cornelia de Injuriis as a named statute does not appear in modern civil codes.