# Corpus Juris Civilis (The Law of Justinian) The **Corpus Juris Civilis** — the "body of civil law" — is the great codification of Roman law issued between **529 and 534 CE** under the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) emperor **Justinian I**, compiled by a commission led by the jurist **Tribonian**. It gathered a thousand years of Roman legal thought into a single authoritative body, and after its rediscovery in eleventh-century Bologna it became the foundation of the **civil-law tradition** that still governs most of continental Europe, Latin America, and much of the wider world. It is the indispensable root of Western jurisprudence — the source from which concepts of property, obligation, contract, persons, and the very grammar of legal reasoning descend. This entry is a **curated landing**: the complete *Corpus* runs to many volumes, so the elementary textbook (Justinian's *Institutes*) is hosted here in full, and the verified public-domain editions of the whole work are linked below. **Source:** S. P. Scott, *The Civil Law* (1932) — the complete English translation, Public Domain — https://constitution.org/2-Authors/sps/sps.htm --- ## The four parts of the Corpus The name *Corpus Juris Civilis* was given later (by the editor Dionysius Gothofredus in 1583) to the four works that Justinian's commission produced: - **Codex Justinianus (the Code).** A collection of the binding imperial enactments (*constitutiones*) then in force. A first edition was promulgated in **529**; a revised second edition, the *Codex repetitae praelectionis*, followed in **534**. - **Digesta, or Pandectae (the Digest).** Promulgated in **533**, fifty books of excerpts from the writings of the classical Roman jurists — Ulpian, Paulus, Papinian, Gaius, and others — given the force of law. It is the heart of the *Corpus* and the richest surviving source of classical Roman jurisprudence. - **Institutiones (the Institutes).** Also issued in **533**, a four-book introductory textbook for first-year law students, modelled closely on the earlier *Institutes* of Gaius. It is the most accessible part of the whole work — and is hosted here in full (see below). - **Novellae Constitutiones (the Novels).** The new laws Justinian issued *after* 534, mostly in Greek. Justinian never compiled them himself; they survive through later private collections. ## Why it matters - It preserved classical Roman law — most of what we know of the great jurists survives only through the *Digest*. - Rediscovered and taught at **Bologna** from the late eleventh century (the Glossators, beginning with Irnerius), it became the basis of the medieval *ius commune* — the shared learned law of Europe. - It is the direct ancestor of the modern **civil-law** codes (the French *Code civil*, the German *BGB*, and their descendants worldwide), and it shaped the canon law of the Church and the vocabulary of law itself. --- ## Download the complete Institutes (Justinian's textbook of the law) The *Institutes* — the four-book introduction to the whole system — is hosted here in full, free to read and to download: - **Institutes of Justinian — complete English (Moyle):** [download the full text →](https://messagestothemasses.org/library/downloads/institutes-of-justinian-moyle.txt) — translated by John Baron Moyle (5th ed., 1913). Public Domain. ## The complete Corpus — verified public-domain editions The full *Corpus Juris Civilis* is very large (the Scott English runs to seventeen volumes), so the complete work is linked rather than mirrored here: - **English — S. P. Scott, *The Civil Law* (1932):** the only complete single-source English translation of the entire *Corpus* (Institutes, Digest, Code, and Novels). Public Domain (its copyright lapsed without renewal). https://constitution.org/2-Authors/sps/sps.htm - **English — Justinian's Code, Fred H. Blume (annotated):** the best modern English of the *Code*, hosted by the University of Wyoming (freely readable; link only). https://www.uwyo.edu/lawlib/blume-justinian/ - **Latin — Mommsen, Krüger, Schöll & Kroll critical edition** (Weidmann, 1872–95): the standard scholarly Latin text. Public Domain; page scans on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/search?query=corpus+iuris+civilis+mommsen - **Latin — Roman Law Library (droitromain, Grenoble):** the complete Latin texts including the *Novellae* (freely readable; link only). https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/ --- *Provenance & licence: The Corpus Juris Civilis (529–534 CE) is the codification of Roman law issued under the emperor Justinian I and compiled under Tribonian; the modern title was coined by Dionysius Gothofredus in 1583. The complete English translation linked here is Samuel Parsons Scott's* The Civil Law *(1932), which is in the public domain (its copyright expired without renewal) — it is complete and freely usable, though later scholars (e.g. Kearley) have criticised its accuracy, so it is offered as a historic and complete public-domain edition rather than the scholarly gold standard. The* Institutes *hosted in full here is John Baron Moyle's public-domain English translation (5th ed., 1913), via Project Gutenberg eBook #5983. The standard Latin text is the Mommsen–Krüger–Schöll–Kroll edition (1872–95), public domain. Reproduced for the M2M² Source Library.*