Definition
Rescripta (singular: rescriptum) is a Latin term from Roman civil law referring to imperial rescripts — written responses issued by the Roman emperor or his chancery to petitions, inquiries, or requests for legal guidance submitted by magistrates, officials, judges, or private parties. These imperial replies carried the force of authoritative legal pronouncement and became a significant source of Roman law. The term was secondarily applied in early common law commentary to refer to original writs, the foundational written commands issuing from the English royal chancery that initiated judicial proceedings.
1. Civil Law Sense: Written responses of the Roman emperor to legal questions, functioning as authoritative imperial pronouncements on points of law.
2. Common Law Secondary Sense: A term occasionally applied by early common lawyers to original writs — the formal written commands that gave courts jurisdiction to hear a case.
Common Confusion
Rescripta should not be conflated with rescriptum in the singular, nor with the broader category of imperial constitutions (constitutiones), of which rescripta were only one species. Roman legal scholars distinguished rescripta from edicta (general proclamations), mandata (administrative instructions to officials), and decreta (decisions in contested cases). Burrill himself directs readers from rescripta to rescriptum, where the fuller civil law treatment resides. Researchers encountering rescripta in a common law source — particularly citing Coke — should recognize the terminological borrowing and not assume Roman law usage is intended.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Roman jurists and later commentators recognized at least two principal subtypes of rescripta:
Epistolae: Responses addressed to magistrates or public officials seeking guidance on legal questions arising in pending matters. These tended to have broader application.
Subscriptiones (or libelli): Responses written at the bottom of a private petition (libellus) and returned to the petitioner. These addressed private legal inquiries and, while technically binding only in the specific case, accumulated into a body of authoritative interpretation.
Why It Matters in Research
Rescripta surfaces in two distinct research contexts that should not be confused with each other.
First, in Roman and civil law research, rescripta represents a primary category of imperial lawmaking. Understanding where rescripta fit within the taxonomy of Roman legal sources — alongside edicta, decreta, and mandata — is essential for reading Justinian's Codex and the broader Corpus Juris Civilis accurately. The Codex organizes many imperial rescripts, and researchers working with civilian materials will encounter the term frequently as a classification marker.
Second, in early English common law sources, the term appears as a learned borrowing. Coke's use in the Institutes (Co. Litt. 11a, cited by Burrill) applies rescripta to describe original writs — a deliberate analogy between Roman imperial chancery responses and the English royal chancery's writs. This usage reflects the humanist legal scholarship of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when common lawyers drew on Roman law vocabulary to lend systematic structure to English legal concepts. A researcher encountering rescripta in a seventeenth-century common law source should treat it as the author's gloss on English writ practice, not as an import of Roman procedural law.
The term virtually disappears from active legal usage after the eighteenth century. Its appearance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources almost always signals either civil law scholarship, Roman law history, or antiquarian common law commentary. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law as an operative term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief and primarily directional, routing the reader to rescriptum for substantive treatment. The entry does two things worth noting: it confirms the civil law origin by citing Codex 1.23 as the primary authority, and it flags the secondary common law usage by citing Coke's Institutes. This dual citation pattern is characteristic of Burrill's approach to Latinate terms that crossed legal traditions.
What Burrill does not provide — and what no single historical dictionary entry fully captures — is the doctrinal significance of rescripta within Roman law. The term points to an entire structure of imperial legal administration. Historical dictionaries of the common law tradition (including Burrill) tend to treat rescripta as an item of legal vocabulary rather than a substantive doctrine, because by the time those dictionaries were written, the term had no living common law function. Researchers needing depth on the Roman law dimension must move beyond common law dictionary sources to civil law scholarship and the text of the Codex itself.
Jurisdictional Note
Rescripta as an operative legal concept belongs to Roman and civil law traditions. It has no current substantive function in common law jurisdictions. In civil law countries whose systems descend from Roman law, the concept is historically foundational but not used as active legal vocabulary in modern practice.