Justinian's law code banned lawyers from citing the very sources it was built from
Between 529 and 534, Emperor Justinian's editors boiled centuries of Roman law down to a few books and gave every page, even a student textbook, the force of law. Consulting the original texts was forbidden. That compilation, later called the Corpus Juris Civilis, still underpins the legal systems of most of the world.
Justinian took the throne in Constantinople in 527 and, just six months later, ordered a fresh collection of imperial decrees to cut down the tangle of laws and lawsuits. The commissioners could drop, alter or delete obsolete and contradictory material. The resulting Codex was finished on 7 April 529, drawing on older collections such as the Theodosian Code and reaching back to decrees of Hadrian, and it replaced everything before it across the empire.
Next came the ambitious part. A commission led by the court official Tribonian condensed the writings of the classical jurists, a body of literature Justinian considered unmanageably vast, into the Digest, also called the Pandects, finishing within three years. It quotes 38 jurists. How much the editors changed their sources is mostly unknowable, because the originals have largely vanished. A third book, the Institutes, served as an introductory textbook. Laws Justinian passed afterwards, the Novels, now count as a fourth part.
The code also bound church and state together. Its very first law required everyone in the empire to hold the Christian faith as defined by the state church, aimed chiefly at groups it called heretics such as the Nestorians, and people outside that church lost citizenship. Particular pagan practices were outlawed too.
Oddly, the work was written in Latin, still the language of government, even though most people in the eastern empire spoke Greek, which took over by the early seventh century. A Greek adaptation, the Basilika, remained the backbone of Byzantine law into the fifteenth century and later shaped Balkan and modern Greek codes. In the West the Corpus was rediscovered in the Middle Ages, becoming the foundation of every civil law system and heavily influencing Catholic canon law; the Church, it was said, lives by Roman law. It also continues to shape international law.
Source: Corpus Juris Civilis
