Definition
In Roman civil law, sortitio (plural: sortitiones) was the selection or determination of persons or outcomes by lot — a formal casting or drawing of lots. The term most frequently appears in legal sources in its compound form, sortitio judicum, denoting the procedure by which judges (judices) for a criminal trial were chosen by lot from a larger panel. The process functioned as the Roman procedural analogue to what common law systems would later develop as jury selection.
Common Confusion
Sortitio judicum is consistently described in historical legal dictionaries as resembling the modern practice of drawing a jury, but the resemblance is structural rather than doctrinal. Roman judices were not jurors in the common law sense — they were not laypeople rendering a general verdict under judicial instruction. The comparison is a useful navigational shorthand but should not be pressed into any substantive equivalence. Researchers importing common law jury concepts backward onto sortitio will misread the Roman procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
Sortitio is a civil law term with no living English-law counterpart. It appears in historical legal texts almost exclusively as a reference point — invoked to explain Roman criminal procedure or to illuminate the origins of jury selection by analogy. Researchers will encounter it primarily in treatise literature discussing Roman law, comparative procedure, or the historical development of the jury system.
The key research anchor is Blackstone's Commentaries, Book III, page 366, cited by Rapalje & Lawrence, Bouvier, and Burrill in uniform agreement. That passage is the standard English-language treatment connecting sortitio judicum to jury selection history, and following that citation is the most direct route into the corpus literature on this term.
The term does not generate independent doctrine and will not appear in case law as a live legal standard. When it surfaces in a legal text, it is almost always doing historical or comparative work — explaining how a modern practice descended from or parallels a Roman one. Researchers should treat any occurrence as a signal that the surrounding text is engaged in legal history or comparative law, not in stating operative rules.
No jurisdictional variation applies: sortitio is a descriptive historical term, not a rule of any jurisdiction's positive law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries agree on the core definition: sortitio means a casting or drawing of lots, and sortitio judicum refers specifically to the selection of judges for criminal trials by lot in Roman law.
Burrill's entry is the most precise, tracing the term to sortiri (to cast or draw lots) and characterizing sortitio judicum as a "drawing of judges (judices) on criminal trials, resembling the modern practice of drawing a jury." Burrill also cites Halifax's Analysis of the Civil Law alongside Blackstone, providing a second primary source pathway.
Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier track each other closely, both citing 3 Bl. Com. 366 and characterizing the sortitio judicum as "similar to the modern practice of drawing a jury" — language that is apt but, as noted above, requires contextual care.
Black's (both editions) offers the most compressed treatment, defining the term without the Halifax citation and without elaboration on the judices/juror distinction. The 2nd edition entry is notable in the source material for running into an unrelated entry (SOUGH) mid-text, an artifact of the dictionary's original typesetting rather than any legal connection.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural mechanics of sortitio beyond the bare act of lot-drawing, the rules governing the panel from which judges were drawn, or how sortitio interacted with the Roman accusatorial process more broadly. Researchers needing that depth must move beyond the shelf dictionaries to primary Roman law sources and specialist histories of Roman procedure.