Justinians Codification Essay Notes

What were the main problems facing the compilers of Justinians Corpus Juris? How successfully did they resolve them?
Key Facts: Codification started, AD 528, only a few months following Justinians succession to the throne. Justinians chief minister for codification was Tribonian. He decided that the law should be codified, since it had become confused and complex and was not easy to ascertain on a given issue. Parts of the codified work: The Codex vetus: the purpose of this Codex was to collect all the past Emperors Constitutions in one place and also to amend and update the previous constitutions, so as to remove conflicting laws. Justinian set up a commission of ten men with wide reaching powers to change and revise old constitutions. The work took little over a year to complete and the finished Codex superseded all past imperial legislation, including the Theodosian Code. The Fifty Decisions: this was issued in AD 530, to abolish obsolete rules and resolve controversial points of the law found in juristic literature. No copy has survived. The Digest: the centerpiece of Justinians work, the Digest was a collection of all the juristic literature that had gone before. It is considered one of the most important legal texts ever to be produced. Although Justinian failed in his aim to create a model code for his empire, since the work was too large, complex and ill arranged, it does give contemporaries a mass of material on Roman law. A group of 17, under Tribonian was established and tasked with reading all the juristic literature and compiling it in a single volume, such that in so far was possible all the discrepancies and repetition were removed and anthologise the texts so all was contained within one place. A large number of works by the jurist of the past were read and excerpts were included within the Digest from the jurists. The Law of Citations was abolished, as it was held that the opinions of the jurists were of equal authority, although the majority of the excerpts were from Ulpian, Paul and Gaius. Justinian gave the compilers of the Digest the power to interpolate the juristic literature, so as to make his work a more practical volume for practitioners. However, these interpolations are not noted, so it is unclear as to where the compilers changed the work of the jurists. The Digest was compiled within three years as opposed to the initially thought ten; one reason for this may have been the Nika riots AD 532, creating the need for Justinian to find success rapidly. The Institutes: created for fear that the Digest would be too daunting for beginners, the Institutes was founded from the work of classical lawyers, particularly from Gaius Institutes. Unusually for a student textbook, it was also given the force of law. The New Code: this was a revision of the first Codex following a flurry of litigation since the formers promulgation. The New Code made obsolete all that had gone before. The Novellae

Although one of Justinians principle aims in codifying the law as it stood was to remove the complexity of it, his Corpus Juris was still a complex work. Many practitioners did not really use it because of this and it was scarcely used in courts up until the time of Justinians death. However, Justinian did more than simply codify the law of the time. The reforms that were created through the process he instigated were a major improvement to the body of Roman law. Justinian also reformed legal education through his Institutes. Difficulties faced by Justinians compilers: There was a huge amount of juristic literature. Much of the juristic literature held conflicting beliefs/ideas.