No doubt in the case of slaves the decision lay primarily with the master, and in the case of women with the father, husband, or nearest male relative;( 2) but slaves and women were not primarily reckoned as members of the community.

Over sons and grandsons who were -in potestate- the power of the -pater familias- subsisted concurrently with the royal jurisdiction; that power, however, was not a jurisdiction in the proper sense of the term, but simply a consequence of the father's inherent right of property in his children.

We find no traces of any jurisdiction appertaining to the clans as such, or of any judicature at all that did not derive its authority from the king.

As regards the right of self-redress and in particular the avenging of blood, we still find perhaps in legends an echo of the original principle that a murderer, or any one who should illegally protect a murderer, might justifiably be slain by the kinsmen of the person murdered; but these very legends characterize this principle as objectionable,( 3) and from their statements blood-revenge would appear to have been very early suppressed in Rome through the energetic assertion of the authority of the community.

In like manner we perceive in the earliest Roman law no trace of that influence which under the oldest Germanic institutions the comrades of the accused and the people present were entitled to exercise over the pronouncing of judgment; nor do we find in the former any evidence of the usage so frequent in the latter, by which the mere will and power to maintain a claim with arms in hand were treated as judicially necessary or at any rate admissible.
Crimes Judicial procedure took the form of a public or a private process, according as the king interposed of his own motion or only when appealed to by the injured party.