JUSTINIAN CODE. A collection of imperial 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 embodied in the compilations to which Justinian gave his name, and from which that name has re ceived its lustre. Of these, first in contemporary importance, if not first in magnitude and present interest, was the Code. In the first year of his reign he commanded Tribonian, a statesman of his court, to revise the imperial ordinances. The first result, now known as the Codex "Fetus, is not extant. It was superseded a few years after its promulga tion by a new and more complete edition. Although it is this alone which is now known ae 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 codification of the law of the Empire. The first of these works occupied Tribonian and nine asso ciates fourteen months. It le comprised in twelve divisions or books, and embodies all that was deem ed worthy of preservation of the imperial statutes from the time of Hadrian down. The Institutes is an elementary 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 treatisee 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 in three years. It has been thought to bear obvious marks of the haste with which it was compiled; hut it is the chief embodiment of the Roman law, though not the most convenient 'resort for the modern student of that law.
Tribonian found the law, which for fourteen cen turies 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. The comparison, to he more exact, should take into account treatises and digests, which would add to the bulk of the collec tion 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 em powered to amend in substance as well as in form. The codification being completed, the emperor 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 oid. 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, complete, and amend the law, rapidly accumulated throughout his long reign. These are known as the "Novels." The Code, the Institutes, the Pandects, and the Novels, with some subsequent additions, constitute the Corpus Juris Civilis. See Civil, LAW.
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 Sandars (Lund. 1853), which contains the original text also, and copious references to the Digests and Code. Among the modern French commentators are Or tolan and Pasquiere.