Definition
Latin. "He seems to have taken too little care" or "he seems to have been insufficiently upon his guard." A formulaic phrase used in Roman criminal law by a judge or magistrate when pronouncing a sentence of death upon a convicted criminal. The expression did not function as a statement of legal reasoning but as a ritualized verbal form — a conventional declaration accompanying capital condemnation under Roman procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in historical legal scholarship and commentary on Roman law procedure. Researchers working in early Anglo-American legal history may encounter it in Blackstone and in treatises on civil law foundations — both sources cited consistently across the historical dictionaries — but it has no operative function in modern common law or civil law jurisdictions.
The phrase appears in Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Comm. 362, note) in the context of explaining ancient Roman criminal procedure, which places it squarely in the antiquarian and comparative law literature rather than in any living legal doctrine. A researcher who encounters this term in a historical source should treat it as a term of Roman procedure only, with no transitive meaning in English or American case law.
The practical trap for corpus researchers is misreading the phrase as a general maxim or legal principle — it is not. It was a performative, formulaic utterance tied to a specific procedural moment (the death sentence), not a rule of law capable of application or citation as authority. Distinguish it sharply from the adjacent maxim Parum differunt quae re concordant ("Things which agree in substance differ but little"), which appears immediately following in both Black's editions and is a genuine interpretive maxim of broader utility.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — are in complete agreement on definition, context, and authority. Each traces the phrase to Festus (the grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus, whose work De Verborum Significatu catalogued archaic Latin terms and usages), to Taylor's Elements of the Civil Law (an 18th-century English treatise on Roman law), and to Blackstone's Commentaries.
The minor transcription variance between editions — Black's 2nd ed. reads "teo little care" rather than "too little care" — is a typographical artifact of no substantive consequence.
None of the historical sources elaborate on the procedural mechanics of Roman capital sentencing beyond this phrase, nor do they connect it to any English or American legal doctrine. This is appropriate: the phrase was already archaic by the time these dictionaries were compiled, preserved in legal reference works as a matter of completeness in Roman law coverage rather than for practical utility.
The convergence of Festus, Taylor, and Blackstone as the common citation chain across all three dictionaries reflects the standard scholarly genealogy for Roman procedural vocabulary entering English legal reference literature — through Blackstone's learned footnotes and the civil law treatise tradition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Roman Law — Criminal Procedure; Capital Punishment — Historical and Comparative