Background
Marcus Labeo was the son of Pacuvius Antistius Labeo, a jurist who caused himself to be slain after the defeat of his party at Philippi.
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Marcus Antistius Labeo
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The younger Labeo early entered public life, and soon rose to the praetorship; but his undisguised antipathy to the new regime, and the somewhat brusque manner in which in the senate he occasionally gave expression to his republican sympathies-what Tacitus (Ann. iii. 75) calls his incorrupta libertas- proved an obstacle to his advancement, and his rival, Ateius Capito, who had unreservedly given in his adhesion to the ruling powers, was promoted by Augustus to the consulate, when the appointment should have fallen to Labeo; smarting under the wrong done him, Labeo declined the office when it was offered to him in a subsequent year.
To his knowledge of the law he added a wide general culture, devoting his attention specially to dialectics, philology (gram- matica), and antiquities, as valuable aids in the exposition, expansion, and application of legal doctrine (Gell. xiii. 10). Down to the time of Hadrian his was probably the name of greatest authority; and several of his works were abridged and annotated by later hands. While Capito is hardly ever referred to, the dicta of Labeo are of constant recurrence in the writings of the classical jurists, such as Gaius, Ulpian and Paul; and no inconsiderable number of them were thought worthy of preservation in Justinian's Digest. Labeo gets the credit of being the founder of the Proculian sect or school, while Capito is spoken of as the founder of the rival Sabinian one (Pomponius in fr. 47, Dig. i. 2); but it is probable that the real founders of the two scholae were Proculus arid Sabinus, followers respectively of the methods of Labeo and Capito. Labeo's most important literary work was the Libri Posteriorum, so called because published only after his death. It contained a systematic exposition of the common law.
