Roman judges and superintendents would regularly consult with an advisory panel of jurisconsults before leaving a decision, and advocates and ordinary people also went to jurisconsults for legal opinions. Thus, the Romans were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems, and this is why their law became so "exact, particular, and technical."
During the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, jurisconsults and lawyers were unregulated, since the former were amateurs and the latter were technically illegal, any citizen could call himself an advocate or a legal expert, though whether people believed him would depend upon his individual reputation. By the start of the Byzantine Empire, the legal profession had become well-established, heavily regulated, and highly stratified. The centralization and bureaucratization of the profession was apparently regular at first, but go faster during the reign of Emperor Hadrian. At the same time, the jurisconsults went into reject during the imperial period.
By the fourth century, advocates had registered on the bar of a court to argue before it, they could only be attached to one court at a time, and there were limits (which came and went depending upon who was emperor) on how many advocates could be enrolled at a particular court. By the 380s, advocates were studying law in addition to rhetoric; in 460, Emperor Leo obliged a necessity that new advocates seeking admission had to produce testimonials from their teachers; and by the sixth century, a regular course of legal study lasting about four years was required for admission.
The notaries (tabelliones) appeared in the late Roman Empire. Like their modern-day descendants, the civil law notaries, they were responsible for drafting wills, conveyances, and contracts. They were everywhere and most villages had one In Roman times, notaries were widely considered to be lesser to advocates and jurisconsults. Roman notaries were not law-trained; they were barely literate cuts who wrapped the simplest transactions in mountains of legal jargon, since they were paid by the line.
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