Ius commune defined and governed inheritance in Italian communities at one remove. Local statutory regulation of inheritance took precedence, aiming to produce desired modifications to the rules of ius commune. Every Italian community seems to have crafted at least a set of rules laying out lines of intestate succession. Perhaps the overriding purpose of such laws was to disadvantage women in the inheritance of important family property, while protecting and defining their dowry rights. These statutes thus “corrected” (to use the language of jurisprudence) the ius commune which, by the legislation of Justinian, treated men and women, male and female lines of descent, equally. Florence's statute governing women's inheritance claims was perhaps more extensive in its exclusion of them in favor of male agnates, but it was generally unexceptional in this regard. Communities regularly sought to preserve family property in the hands of agnatic kin (favor agnationis), one consequence of which was a general assumption that one's sons took immediate possession on death, without requiring a formal act of acceptance, aditio. Only in the course of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, would more communities demand aditio. But it never became a general rule.

Another vital area of civic legislative concern was the trustworthiness and transparency of markets. Forgery, counterfeiting, falsifying records, defaulting on credit obligations, bankruptcy, and fraud were countered by an ever-growing body of enactments. Healthy markets and communal collection of taxes and duties rested on countering such nefarious practices.