How Justinian adapted roman law for the use by the Byzantines.?

Answer 1

Justinian commissioned the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), which was also given the name Justinian Code in the Renaissance.

This work was not an adaptation of Roman civil law. It was a reorganisation and an updating of centuries of Roman juridical tradition and an aid for law students.

There were four parts of the Corpus Juris Civilis.

1) The Codex compiled a selection of imperial enactments going back to the days of Hadrian.

2) The Digesta was a anthology of 50 books of fragments and essays by the most prominent jurists in Roman history. These writings were private opinions.

3) The Institutiones comprised four student textbooks which introduced legal conceptual elements in a less developed manner compared with the other two parts.

4) The Novellae was a collection of laws promulgated by Justinian from after the publication of the Corpus until his death.

The aim of the work was to reorganise the judicial system of the empire which over time had became chaotic, to discard redundant enactments and the ones that had been repealed, and to amend obscure passages.

With regard to the codex part of this work, there were two editions. The first one was already redundant when it was published in 529 because it contained enactments that had already become redundant and it did not include enactments that had been issued in the meantime. This edition has been lost. As second edition was published in 534.

This codex was not the first one. there had been three earlier ones: the Codex Theodosianus, published in 429 which collected the enactments of the Christian emperos since 312; the Codex Gregorianus, published in the 380s which collected enactments from the 130s to the 290s, and the Codex Hermogeaunus, which collected the enactments of the emperors of the tetrarchy (Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius and Gelerius), mostly from 293-94. The latter provided a model for the stucture of the Corpus Juris Civilis.

Answer 2

First of all the Byzantines were the Romans. Byzantine Empire is s term which has been coined by historians to indicate the eastern part of the Roman Empire after the fall of its western part. The people in question called it Roman Empire.

Justinian I commissioned the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) which was dubbed Justinian Code in the 16th century. It collected Roman law into books (code is derived from codex, the Latin word for bound book), as previously laws had been written on scrolls. It also revised and provided law textbooks for law students.

The Corpus Juris Civilis came in four parts:

1) The Codex (book) Justinianus, which was a review of imperial laws going back 400 years (to the time of Hadrian). It scrapped obsolete or unnecessary laws, made changes when necessary and clarified obscure passages. Its aim was to put the laws in a single book (previously they were written on many different scrolls), harmonise conflicting views among jurists which arose from centuries of poorly organised development of Roman law and have a uniform and coherent body of law. It consists of 12 books, 1 book covers ecclesiastical law, the duties of high officers and sources of law, 7 cover private law, 1 criminal law and 3 administrative laws.

2) The Digesta is a collection of fragments taken from essays on laws written by jurists (mostly from the 2nd and 3rd centuries) which express the private opinions of legal experts. Most were from Ulpian (40%) and Paulus (17%). It was a large amount of writing which was condensed in 50 books. It was used as an advanced law student textbook.

3) The Institutiones is a textbook for first year law students written by two professors. It was a series of extracts from statements on the basic institutions of Roman law from the teaching books by 'writers of authority.' In was largely based on the texts of Gaius, a jurist of the 2nd century AD.

4) The Novellae Constitutiones, which contained laws recently issued by Justinian.

Answer 3

He did not adapt Roman law. He, or his legal advisers,

consolidated the existing laws.