Chapter II: On The Offices Of Those Who Are Engaged In The Forum

2293. • Preliminary Notes. I. Forensic judgment is usually defined: The sentence of a judge concerning a right disputed between plaintiff and defendant, after due discussion has been carried out.

In this definition there are included: 1. The cause, or the disputed right, as the object of the judgment; 2. Three distinct and necessary persons: the plaintiff, the defendant, who litigate concerning the right, and the judge who pronounces; 3. The legitimate discussion and definition of the cause, as the form of the judgment.

2294. • II. Judgments are OF HUMAN LAW formally and as to solemnities, as is clear from their history; but originally they are OF NATURAL LAW; for, the condition of fallen nature being posited, it is necessary that crimes and lawsuits occur; but since it is repugnant to right reason that anyone be judge in his own cause: thence it is altogether required that judges and judgments be constituted by public authority, by which doubts of right are duly settled. - Yet natural law does not absolutely require that all crimes be restrained, and that all lawsuits be settled by judgments properly so called. For sometimes it is expedient, "when crimes are atrocious, to punish at once those caught in the very act of crime, or in excepted crimes to change the common manner of proceeding." Indeed military discipline has this as proper to itself, that it is right for leaders, every form of forensic judgment having been passed over, to punish the offenses of soldiers. And Bishops similarly can, in certain cases, proceed extra-judicially, e.g. from informed conscience¹⁰ (cf. n. 731).

2295. • III. But in no judgment, even a summary one, can those things be omitted which are called the substantial things of judgments: for these are of natural law, against which custom cannot prevail. - Hence, in every judgment properly so called there are found: 1. the petition of the plaintiff and citation of the defendant; 2. proof of the cause, and its defense; 3. decision of the cause, and pronouncement of the sentence. And these THREE pertain to the nature or substance of the judgment; but the other things pertain to solemnity.¹¹

Note. Among the legitimate forms of judgments, canon law excels, which first wove together the judicial web in the second book of the Decretals, from which thereafter every civil procedure was derived, as all Doctors testify with one voice.¹²

These things having been premised, there must be treated: 1. concerning the persons who constitute the judgment, namely concerning the judge, the plaintiff, and the defendant; 2. concerning the persons who intervene in the judgment, for helping either the litigants or the judge, i.e. concerning witnesses, advocates, etc. - (Recall what was said n. 1292, 7, and n. 1321.)