Code of Justinian: The Corpus Juris Civilis and Roman Law

The Code of Justinian, in its wider sense the Corpus Juris Civilis, is the great compilation of Roman law made on the orders of the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I between 529 and 534, with later additions. Led by the jurist Tribonian, imperial commissions sifted centuries of laws and legal writings into a Code, a Digest and a textbook called the Institutes. Rediscovered in medieval Italy, it became the foundation of legal education and of the civil-law systems used across most of Europe and much of the world today.

Background: a law in disorder

By the early sixth century Roman law was vast and confusing. It consisted of thousands of imperial decrees, known as constitutions, issued over three centuries, and of the writings of classical jurists such as Gaius, Papinian, Paul and Ulpian, who had worked mainly between the first and third centuries AD.

Earlier attempts at order existed. Private collections of imperial laws, the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes, had been made around 300, and Theodosius II issued an official Theodosian Code in 438. But many laws contradicted each other, and the jurists’ writings were too extensive for judges and advocates to master. A law of 426, the so-called Law of Citations, simply told judges to count the opinions of five leading jurists.

Justinian, who became emperor in 527, saw legal reform as part of restoring the Roman state. A clear law would strengthen imperial authority, speed up the courts and reflect his Christian rule.

The first Code (529)

On 13 February 528 Justinian appointed a commission of ten men, including Tribonian and the future praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian, to produce a new collection of imperial laws. They worked from the three earlier codes and later laws, removing obsolete and repeated material. The result, the Codex Justinianus, was promulgated on 7 April 529 and came into force on 16 April. This first version does not survive.

The commission’s work exposed many old disputes. Between 530 and 531 Justinian issued a series of rulings, the Fifty Decisions, to settle controversial questions before the next and much larger stage began.

The Digest and the Institutes (530–533)

On 15 December 530 Justinian ordered Tribonian to compile the writings of the classical jurists into a single work. Tribonian, then quaestor, chose sixteen colleagues, including the law professors Theophilus of Constantinople and Dorotheus of Berytus (modern Beirut), along with advocates and officials.

The commissioners read about 2,000 books containing, by Justinian’s own account, some three million lines, and reduced them to about 150,000. They took extracts from 39 jurists, above all Ulpian, whose writings make up roughly two-fifths of the whole, and Paul. They were allowed to change texts to bring them up to date, and these edits, called interpolations, have kept scholars busy ever since. The result, the Digest (in Greek, Pandects), was issued in 50 books on 16 December 533. It was finished in barely three years, far faster than Justinian had expected.

At the same time Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus wrote the Institutes, a four-book textbook for first-year students modelled on the second-century Institutes of Gaius. It was promulgated on 21 November 533. Both works came into force on 30 December 533.

Justinian wanted his compilation to be final. Once the Digest was in force, citing the original works of the jurists in court was forbidden, and he banned commentaries on it, permitting only word-for-word Greek translations, indexes and short summaries. The ban could not be enforced for long: law teachers in Constantinople and Berytus soon produced Greek paraphrases and notes, and those works helped the law survive in the eastern empire.

The revised Code and the Novels

The Fifty Decisions and other new laws soon made the 529 Code out of date. A revised version, the Codex repetitae praelectionis, was issued on 16 November 534 and came into force on 29 December 534. It contains about 4,600 constitutions in twelve books, from Hadrian to Justinian himself, and it is this second edition that survives.

Justinian went on legislating. His later laws were called Novels (Novellae Constitutiones, “new constitutions”). Most were written in Greek, the language of most of his subjects, and they were never officially collected; they survive in private compilations, including a Greek collection of 168 laws and the Latin collections known as the Authenticum and the Epitome of Julian.

Together, the Code, Digest, Institutes and Novels make up what is now called the Corpus Juris Civilis. The title came into general use after the printed edition of Dionysius Gothofredus in 1583.

Key people

• Justinian I (r. 527–565): commissioned the work and gave it the force of law.
• Tribonian (died c. 542): quaestor and the driving force behind the Digest, Institutes and revised Code. He was briefly dismissed during the Nika riots of 532 but soon restored (see Nika riots).
• Theophilus and Dorotheus: professors at the law schools of Constantinople and Berytus who helped write the Institutes.
• Irnerius (c. 1050–after 1125): teacher at Bologna, regarded as the founder of the medieval study of Justinian’s law.

Revival in medieval Europe

In the West, Justinian’s law was introduced into Italy after the reconquest by the Pragmatic Sanction of 554, but the Digest fell almost entirely out of use for centuries. In the East, it was gradually replaced by Greek summaries, culminating in the Basilika issued under Leo VI around 900.

In the late eleventh century the Digest re-emerged in Italy. A single sixth-century manuscript, the Littera Florentina, was preserved at Pisa and taken to Florence in 1406. At Bologna, Irnerius and his successors, the glossators, began to teach the texts line by line, writing explanatory notes, or glosses, in the margins (see University of Bologna). Around 1230–1250 Accursius gathered these into the Glossa Ordinaria, the standard commentary for centuries.

Students from across Europe learned Roman law at Bologna and later at other universities. Canon law, the law of the church, drew on the same methods, and the combination, known as the ius commune, influenced courts from Spain to Poland.

Legacy

The Corpus Juris Civilis shaped the vocabulary and structure of modern private law: contracts, property, obligations, wrongs and succession. Its influence runs through the great codifications, including the French Civil Code of 1804 (see Napoleonic Code) and the German Civil Code of 1900, and from them to legal systems in Latin America, parts of Asia and Africa. Even England, with its common law, borrowed Roman ideas, and Scotland and South Africa absorbed them more directly.

Its texts also preserve much of what we know of classical Roman law and Roman society. Justinian’s preface to the Institutes, with its claim that imperial majesty should be armed with laws as well as weapons, expressed an ideal of the ruler as lawgiver that later kings and emperors adopted.

Timeline

• 13 February 528: Justinian appoints a commission to compile a new Code.
• 7 April 529: First Code of Justinian is promulgated.
• 15 December 530: Tribonian is ordered to compile the Digest.
• 21 November 533: Institutes promulgated.
• 16 December 533: Digest promulgated; both enter into force on 30 December.
• 16 November 534: Revised Code issued, effective 29 December 534.
• 535–565: Justinian issues his Novels.
• Late 11th century: Irnerius begins teaching the Digest at Bologna.

Why it matters

Justinian’s compilation preserved the legal wisdom of ancient Rome at the moment the classical world was ending. Rediscovered five centuries later, it gave Europe a shared legal language and remains, directly or indirectly, the foundation of the civil law used by much of the world’s population.