Lex Scribonia
Lex Scribonia of unknown date, enacted that praedial urban servitudes should not be acquirable by usucapio (Dig. 41, 3, 4, 29): rustic servitudes could never be so acquired (apart from the praedia to which they were annexed), owing to the impossibility of applying to them the notion of possession (Dig. 8, 1, 14, pr.). The statute, however, did not prohibit the extinction of a servitude by lapse of time, which the Romans call usucapio libertatis
(Dig. 41, 3, 4, 29). But the prescriptive acquisition of servitudes was re-introduced through the praetorian doctrine of longi temporis possessio. [SERVITUTES; USUCAPIO.] See Unterholtzner, Verjahrungslehre, 2. § § 195-197.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.