Corpus Juris

[Preliminary note for non-lawyers: this article appeared in a publication directed at lawyers, who would have understood the title. The Corpus Juris Secundum — normally just “CJS” — is a famous set of legal reference books. Since CJS is obviously the “Second” CJ, what was the first?]

It was the Corpus Juris Civilis — the “Body of the Civil Law” — produced in the sixth century under the Emperor Justinian.

By this time the Empire was Roman in name only. Rome and the Western Empire had fallen a century before, leaving what we now call the Byzantine Empire, an eastern-European empire run from Constantinople by Greeks and other easterners (Justinian was what we would today call Yugoslavian). [March-of-Time note: Yugoslavian, that is, when this article was written. For that matter, he might have been what we would call Albanian. In any event, he was from the Balkans, though educated at Constantinople.] Justinian had ambitions to revive Roman glories and was in part successful; his armies recaptured northern Africa from the Vandals and recovered Italy itself from the Ostrogoths before wearing themselves out against the Persians. [Nitpickers note: my original article did say “recovered Italy”; some might argue that that is historically misleading but it is close enough for lawyers.] Although those conquests did not long outlive Justinian, two products of his reign did: the church/mosque now known as the Hagia Sophia and the Corpus Juris.

In the sixth century Roman law was several hundred years old. Unfortunately, it was so old that no one quite knew what it was. Law consisted of 600 years of imperial decrees and the remnants of pre-imperial republican laws, supplemented by legal treatises of varying age and quality. Many of these conflicted with each other. Even finding them was a problem; much information was simply not available except from the Imperial archives. And so Justinian ordered his legal advisor, Tribonian, to collect and reconcile the laws. Tribonian did so with the help of three committees. The project took several years; not all of it was completed until after Justinian’s death.

The Corpus Juris is in four parts, each of which has over time acquired a name.

The first part is called the “Institutes.” It is a basic treatise on Roman law. The committees probably complied it from earlier, similar works. That had been the Roman tradition: rather than carefully to compile laws as they were adopted, every so often someone wrote a treatise attempting to collect and reconcile the law as it had been built up and confused since the last treatise. The Institutes was for centuries the standard introductory text on Roman law.

The second part is the “Digest,” also known as the “Pandects.” It is a collection of over 9000 excerpts from the works of earlier Roman legal scholars, edited and arranged so as to remove inconsistencies. By Imperial decree Justinian gave the Digest the force of law.

The third part of the Corpus Juris is the “Code.” Issued in 529 A.D., it is a collection of Imperial decrees issued before the reign of Justinian. The phrase “Code of Justinian” is sometimes used to refer to the entire Corpus Juris but properly refers only to this third part. The Code was drawn from earlier codes, i.e., earlier collections of decrees (that is what ancient codes were —the Code of Hammurabi, for example). The original edition of the Code is now lost; what remains is the second edition (the “Codex Repetitae Praetectionis”), dating from 534 A.D.

The forth part is the “Novels.” It is a collection of laws issued under Justinian and his successors. (The name comes from “novella constitutionae,” “new laws.”)

The Corpus Juris Civilis became and remained the basis of law in the Byzantine Empire for almost 1000 years. But long before the Empire fell to the Ottomans, its law had become the foundation of European law. The Digest and later works commenting on the Digest were taken to the West by Byzantine scholars and their influence gradually spread throughout Europe. The Corpus Juris is the origin of most European legal systems.

Why is it not the origin of ours? Because it did not reach western Europe until the 12th century A.D., by which time English common law was already established. England, at that time one of the richest and most advanced European countries, did not need it.