Abolishing this right took eight hundred years of gradual change

Evidence

The erosion of vitae necisque potestas — from full legal authority in 451 BCE to effective abolition by the late fourth century CE — takes approximately eight hundred years. It happens in waves. No single emperor abolishes the right at one stroke. No single legal opinion decisively dismantles it. The change is gradual, multi-author, multi-century, and frequently uneven across the empire’s geography. And it is also, if we read it carefully, one of the great success stories of slow legal change in human history. — , The Rod and the Child, 1391

Categorization

• SEED: A core thesis of the chapter: gradual legal change as a model — angle for an essay on how institutionally foundational rights can be eroded without a single revolutionary moment.
• XREF: connects to: The right to petition dates back 800 years to the Magna Carta. — Interpretation: Right to Assemble and Petition; European and American punishment was entirely reorganized in less than a century — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 42; Obsolete common-law doctrines lingered for centuries rather than being abolished openly. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 92