IS. JUSTINIAN CODE. A collection of im perial ordinances compiled by order of the emperor Justinian.
All the judicial wisdom of the Roman civilization which is of importance to the American lawyer is em bodied in the compilations to which Justinian gave his name, and from which that name has received its lustre. Of these, first in contemporary import ance, if not first in magnitude and present interest, was the Code. In the first year of his reign he com manded Tribonian, a statesman of his court, to re vise the imperial ordinances. The first result, now known as the Codex Vetus, is not extant. It was superseded a few years after its promulgation by a new and more complete edition. Although it is this alone which is now known as the Code of Justinian, yet the Pandects and the Institutes which followed it are a part of the same system, declared by the same authority; and the three together form one codifica tion of the law of the Empire. The first of these works occupied Tribonian and nine associates four teen months. It is comprised in twelve divisions or books, and embodies all that was deemed worthy of preservation of the imperial statutes from the time of Hadrian down. The Institutes is an ele mentary treatise prepared by Tribonian and two associates upon the basis of a similar work by Gaius, a lawyer of the second century.
The Pandects, which were made public about a month after the Institutes, were an abridgment of the treaties and the commentaries of the lawyers. They were presented in fifty books. Tribonian and the sixteen associates who aided him in this part of his labors accomplished this abridgment in three years. It has been judged to bear obvious marks of the baste with which it was compiled; but it is the chief embodiment of the Roman law, though not the most convenient resort for the modern stu dent of that law.
19. Tribonian found the law, which for fourteen centuries had been accumulating, comprised in two thousand books, or—stated according to the Roman method of computation—in three million sentences. It is probable that this matter, if printed in law volumes such as are now used, would fill from three to five hundred volumes,—a library per haps as large as that which would be composed by a collection of the Federal statutes and reports and those of the state of Pennsylvania. The com
parison, to be more exact, should take into account treatises and digests, which would add to the bulk of the collection more than to the substance of the material. The commissioners were instructed to extract a series of plain and concise laws, in which there should be no two laws contradictory or alike.
In revising the imperial ordinances, they were powered to amend in substance as well as in form.
20. The codification being completed, the em peror decreed that no resort should be had to the earlier writings, nor any comparison be made with them. Commentators were forbidden to disfigure the new with explanations, and lawyers were forbidden to cite the old. The imperial authority was sufficient to sink into oblivion nearly all the previously exist ing sources of law ; but the new statutes which the emperor himself found it necessary to establish, in order to explain, compkte, and amend the law, rapidly accumulated throughout his long These are known as the "Novels." The Code, tic Institutes, the Pandects, and the Novii,s, with same subsequent additions, constitute the Cuipus Jetrit Cevitui. Though the Code has lost its sanction, and the Pandects are of secondary value to the present age, the Institutes stand an undisturbed monument of the science. The masterly arrangement of the outline of the law there adopted is to this day a model for digests and commentaries. The familiar classification employed by Blackstone is based on this. So far as translation and modern illustration go, it is through the Institutes that the civil law is most accessible to the student.
21. Among English translations of the Institutes are that by Cooper (Phila. 1812; N. Y. 1841),—. which is regarded as a very good one,—and that by Sanders (Lond. 1853), which contains the ori ginal text also, and copidus references to the Di gests and Code. Among the modern French com mentators are Ortolan and Pasquiere.