The texts of classical Roman jurists contained in this book were composed between the first and third centuries ce but they have not been preserved for us in their original form.

Because of the limited durability of papyrus as writing material, new copies of the texts had to be made on a regular basis. The copying process was prone to error and could produce various unintended alterations to the text if the copier miswrote a word, omitted part of the text, or erroneously introduced into the text an earlier reader's marginal or interlinear note.

Our modern knowledge of Roman legal thought largely rests on the form in which excerpts of juristic works were taken into the Digest of Justinian. The Emperor Justinian charged a commission of scholars with the task of excerpting, abbreviating, and adapting the classical jurists' writings with a view to removing what was obsolete and contradictory, so as to allow for a new Justinianic law. Without doubt, very substantial alterations were made to the juristic texts when the Digest was compiled from 530 to 533 ce.

Justinianic legal innovations are generally called “interpolations,” even though they primarily consist not of additions to but omissions from the earlier texts. The Digest commission essentially limited itself to a task of abbreviation, by omitting case examples and citations of supporting or opposing opinions of other jurists. The haste of their work occasionally left evidence of disturbances to the text. These are recognizable by gaps in the argument or logical contradictions and for the most part can be explained as evidence of careless abbreviation or combination. Sometimes, indeed, such disturbances to the text had already appeared in pre-Justinianic times and were simply taken over by the compilers without correction.

Older literature on Roman law (from the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century) adopted an attitude to the texts of the Digest that suspected the compilers not only of formal alterations but also of substantive ones. The consensus of more recent scholarship is that the Digest for the most part preserves the thought of the classical jurists without alteration.