Criminal Liability of Juveniles in Ancient Rome

Abstract

In 2022, the Act on the Support and Rehabilitation of Juveniles was enacted. It introduced new age limits determining the responsibility of minors for criminal acts. In the ongoing public debate on these regulations, legal-historical arguments have been lacking. The aim of this article is to present the principles of criminal responsibility in Roman law, with particular focus on juveniles. The research was carried out on preserved source material using the dogmatic method, which presupposes a logical-linguistic analysis of the source text, taking into account the principles of interpretation, and the historical-legal method, which serves to show the genesis and development of the institution in question. The analyses carried out show that, in Roman law, the perpetrator’s awareness and understanding of the act committed were of greater importance for criminal responsibility than merely having automatically crossed a particular age threshold. The considerations presented are not only significant for the history of law, but also constitute a – hitherto neglected – voice in the discussion on the criminal responsibility of minors in contemporary Polish law.