The act of killing is normally understood, in the context of the civil law, as a contravention which may give rise to the right for reparation for loss such as for family and dependents of the deceased or even, in the case of living beings that can be owned, for their owners. Less commonly understood in the context of the civil law are those instances in which the act of killing describes a positive juridical act: one intended to create or to give shape to civil legal relations. This chapter seeks to explore this side to the relation between death and acts that produce definite consequences in the civil law. It tackles the problem of killing as an operation of the civil law using two examples from Roman jurisprudence: first, the role that the Roman ‘right of life and death’ (ius vitae necisque) plays in Digest 28.2.11 and, second, the meaning of killing in relation to the ‘action on poverty’ (actio de pauperie) in Digest 9.1.1.10. Death is argued in these two examples to be far from a stranger either to the depth and originality of legal thought or to its peculiar mode of creativity.