LEX AQU ILIA. (B. C. about 287.) The law, superseding the earlier portions of the Twelve Tables, providing a remedy for wil ful and negligent damage to corporeal prop erty.
Although an action founded upon the text of this law could only be brought when the damage was caused by actual contact of the offending party with the body of the injured thing, the praetor sub sequently it in the shape of an actio utilis, to cases where .the damage was merely the indirect result of the ,act of the defendant, and in certain eases, he even granted an actio in factum after the pattern of the lex aquffict in cases where there was not, strictly speaking, any damage to the thing, but where the owner was deprived of it in such a man ner as to make it tantamount to a destruction of the thing.
By this law, if the slave or animal were wrong fully killed, the owner could recover from the slayer, not the actual value of the property at the time of the death, but the greatest value that it had possessed during the previous year, and when the damage consisted of any other injury to corporeal things, he was obliged to pay the highest value of such property within the month immediately pre ceding.' If the wrongdoer denied his liability and
judgment was against him, he was obliged to pay double damages. This law also provided for an ac tion against adetipulators who abused their formal rights, but this portion of it fell into disuse because the recognition by the civil law of the obligation by niandatum enabled the injured party to sue the fraudulent adstipulator by the oak) mandati di recta for full damages. See Sohm, Rom. L. 326 ; Morey, Rom. L. 381.