The princeps Marcus Aurelius made very extensive use of the decretum. There are about twenty of them in the three periods into which his principality is usually divided. Very well known in particular is the so-called decretum Divi Marci which we know through D. 48.7.7 (Call. 5 de cogn.) and D. 4.2.13 (Call. 5 de cogn.). The research intends to underline both some procedural aspects of the hearings held before the imperial court, which emerge precisely from the comparison between the two texts altered by the Justinian commissioners and, above all, the achieved 'normative' scope of these measures, whose imperativeness went well beyond the single case decided not only because of the auctoritas of the prince, but also because of the will directly expressed by Marcus Aurelius.