A rediscovered Roman law book reshaped European courts after 1070
When Justinian's great compilation of Roman law resurfaced around 1070, scholars at Bologna began teaching it. Their glosses, memory aids and debating methods revived Roman law across Europe, and merged with church law into a shared legal system that guided judges for centuries.
A judiciary is the system of courts that settles disputes and applies the law to particular cases. Under the separation of powers it neither writes statutes, the legislature's job, nor enforces them, the executive's, though common law courts do make law case by case, building precedent that later courts follow. Many courts can also strike down rules that conflict with a constitution or treaty.
Early Roman justice ran in two stages. First, an official, originally a priest because law belonged to religion, identified the applicable rules; then an odd number of ordinary citizens, more orators than lawyers, heard the case with no rules of evidence and little chance of appeal. Customs of the ancestors were written down in the Twelve Tables in 451 to 449 BC. Later an elected praetor issued yearly edicts, and under the emperors professional judges representing the ruler took over, with appeals to their superiors. Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis gathered all of it in four parts.
In medieval universities, civil law and canon law were separate faculties. The monk Gratian organised church law into the Decretum, which anchored Catholic canon law until 1918. By the fifteenth century the two traditions blended into the ius commune, a partly inquisitorial, partly adversarial procedure in which appeals were possible. Historian Kenneth Pennington warns that the true minds of medieval judges are unknowable; in practice, rules offered little protection to heretics, the poor or political enemies. After the French Revolution, lawmakers briefly forbade judges from interpreting law at all, until the Napoleonic Code reversed that.
Structures today vary. American state courts handle 98 percent of litigation. In France two separate top courts divide administrative from civil and criminal cases. Japan demands a decade of practical experience before full judgeship, and runs 438 summary courts beneath its Supreme Court.
Source: Judiciary
