THE CORPUS IURIS CIVILIS
Time being as it is, the great majority of classical Roman legal works have perished. Almost all of the knowledge we have of classical Roman law comes to us through the Corpus luris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), the great compilation of Roman law prepared under the instructions of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century.
The Corpus luris Civilis contains four parts, namely the Institutes, the Digest, the Codex and the Novels.The Codex
The Codex, sometimes Anglicised as “Code”, is a collection of imperial legislation, compiled in ad 534, and superseding an earlier collection issued in 529. The compilation of the Codex was assisted by the existence of two unofficial collections from the reign of Diocletian, and an official collection compiled under the instructions of Theodosius II in ad 438.
It should be noted that this is not wholly legislation in the modern sense. As we have seen, the emperor sometimes gave judgements in legal disputes, some emperors being more interested in this than others, and also gave responses to questions and petitions. Because they came from the emperor, such judgements and responses were seen as generally binding, and hence as legislation, and much of the Codex is taken up by such matters.
The Novels
The Novels appear in modern editions of the Corpus luris Civilis as a colÂlection of subsequent legislation. Such a collection was envisaged, but not actually carried out, by Justinian, and collections appearing in modern editions are derived from unofficial or semi-official collections.
The Institutes
Justinian’s Institutes was an elementary textbook, written by members of the commission that compiled the Digest. The book was largely based on the Institutes of Gaius, in terms of both content and, especially, structure. Thus, Gaius’s Institutional Scheme is adopted with some modifications in Justinian’s book.
The Institutes were issued in ad 533 along with the Digest, and were intended as a student’s introduction to law, taking up most of the first year of study. The remainder of the student’s time, once the basics were mastered, was to be devoted to the study of the Digest.The Digest
The major part of the Corpus Iuris Civilis is the Digest. This is a massive collection of extracts from the writings of classical jurists. The work of compiling the Digest was entrusted to a commission headed by Tribonian, one of Justinian’s ministers. In addition to collecting the juristic texts, the commission was instructed to edit them so that they contained nothing obsolete or contradictory. The extent of such alterations to the text, or “interpolations” as they are known, is unclear. At one time it was thought that the Digest texts were extensively interpolated, and something of an “interpolation hunt” ensued. A more restrained view is now taken, though interpolations undoubtedly exist.
The work of compiling the Digest took three years, from ad 530 to 533.Justinian tells us that 3,000,000 lines of text were read, and reduced to 150,000 lines. The great majority of the text appearing in the Digest was taken from jurists of the years between ad 100 and 250.
In contrast with the orderly arrangement of the material in the Institutes, there is little in the way of coherent structure to the Digest. It is arranged into books and titles in the chronological order of the praetor’s edict being discussed, and so has an essentially arbitrary arrangement of subject matter.
Within each title, there is a series of extracts from juristic writings, each giving the name of the author and the source text at the beginning. Even these texts are arranged in a way that is apparently arbitrary. The order of the texts was analysed in the nineteenth century by a German scholar called Bluhme. By noting that texts from the same sources tend to be found in the same order in different titles, Bluhme demonstrated that the work of the commission had been divided between three committees.
Each was charged with collecting material from one of three “masses” of texts, named the Sabinian, Edictal and Papinian masses for the first works in each mass. There was also an Appendix mass, perhaps consisting of material that came to light during the process of compilation. The full commission probably met only for a final edit. Without careful editing, this approach will mean that texts dealing with the same issue will often appear far apart within a title, if they happen to be from sources in different masses. In fact, such careful editing was not present, and so the texts appear in a rather haphazard fashion.
Essential Facts
• Much of the development of Roman law came through interpretaÂtion by a class of legal experts known as jurists. The jurists wrote extensively on the law, particularly during the “classical” period, i.e. the late Republic and approximately the first two and a half centuries of the Empire.
• A second-century jurist, Gaius, was responsible for the Institutional Scheme. This involved dividing private law into three parts (persons, things and actions), with numerous subclassifications. This approach has been influential into modern law.
• Further development came through the praetor’s role in litigation. The praetor would allow new remedies to supplement the civil law. The law created by the praetor was known as the ius honorarium.
• Legislation, produced by the citizen assemblies and (during the early Empire) the Senate, was a less important source of law. However, during the Empire, the emperors took an increasingly active role in lawmaking.
• In the sixth century, the emperor Justinian caused a compilation of legal materials, known as the Corpus luris Civilis, to be made. This comprised the Institutes (a student textbook based on a work of the same name by Gaius), the Digest (a compilation ofjuristic writings) and the Codex (a collection of imperial pronouncements). Modern editions also include the Novels, an unofficial collection of imperial pronouncements dating after the issue of the Codex.
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