Assignment 3

Post-classical period

Period: 235 to 527

Period of time that coincides partially with the Dominate and ends with Justinian, in which the power of the sovereign is the only one legitimates law, which leads to the decadence of the creative Jurisprudence.

Division of the Empire by Diocletian

285

Division of the Roman Empire supervised by Diocletian, creating a tetrarchy to facilitate the administration of the territory. With this, two augusti and two caesars were put in charge, one of each in each half of the newly divided Empire. It did not continue after the death of Diocletian.

Dominato

Period: 285 to 476

Political period referred to as Dominus et Deus which meant that there was a power concentration in the emperor, since he was the living embodiement of law and a representation of God. He had the military power which meant: judicial, legislative and governamental power.
During this time important compilations of laws appeared, made by the emperors. The main ones were the Codex Gregorianus and the Codex Hermogenianus.

Codex Gregorianus

291

Compilation of norms made privately by Gregorianus. It was produced as a result of the need to put order because of the confusion with the laws. It was written during Diocletian’s reign, around 291. It contains mainly rescriptos. It was centered in private law, divided in 15 books. Emperor Theodosius made it official in the V century, and it was derogated with the publication of Justinians compilation, in the year 518.

Codex Hermogenianus

291

Compilation of norms thought as a complement or update to the Codex Gregorianus, written by Hermogenianus, a very accomplished and important jurist under Emperor Diocletian’s reign. It was formed by constitutions compiled mainly between 293 and 294, being the Codex published in 295. It was only one book, with numerous titles inside. It was official in the period between 439 and 518, with the publication of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. It has not been kept intact, with only fragments remaining.

Edict of Thessalonica

380

The Edict of Thessalonica is also called the "Three Emperors' Edict" because it was passed in Thessalonica in 380 by the Roman emperors Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian II. It was primarily through this that Christianity became the state religion. Although the edict is only directed to the population of Constantinople, it was meant for everyone in the empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m84eQs6e4VA

Foedus between Romans and Visigoths

418

Settlement between the Roman Empire and the Visigoths with which the latter agreed to use its army to help the first defeat its enemies, the barbarians, which had occupied the territory of Hispania. In exchange, the Visigoths would get the right to stay in the land they had protected.

Lex of Citations

426

Norm made by emperor Valentinian III, whose purpose was to help judges deal with the vast amount of jurist writings and reach a decision. Authority was given to Ulpianus, Gaius, Paulus, Papinianus and Modestinus, and quotations used by jurists also had authority. However if there was conflict between the jurists, majority would prevail; in a tie between jurists, the view of Papinianus would be applied; and if Papinianus expressed no opinion, a judge would then be free to use his own judgement.

Codex Theodosiaus

438

Emperor Theodosius II decided to create this code, which was a compilation of laws of the Roman Empire under Christian emperores, since 312 to 437. This was a collection of 16 books with more than 2500 constituions. It is possible to acces the Codex Theodosiaus .

Fall of Western Roman Empire

476

This fall meant the loss of political control in the Western Roman Empire, therefore, the empire was no longer able to enforce its rule. The power was lost to the Barbarian Kingdom who established their power there. In 476, the Germanic Barbarian king deposed the last emperor of the Western empire. The empire was no longer able to rise again. However, the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Empire, survived even with less strengh.

Codex Euricianus

480

The Code of Euric was written around 480. It's a compilation of laws governing the Visigoths, made by Euric's order, King of the Visigoths. Writing laws that were preserved only by tradition. Roman Law prevails, since the compilation was actually made by a roman lawyer. In this code de customs of the Visigoth nation were recognised and affirmed.

Breviary of Alaric II

506

It's a collection of roman law, compiled by unknown writers and approved in an assembly of bishops and representatives of the king. It applied, not to the Visigothic nobles who lived under their own law which had been formulated by Euric, but to the Hispano-Roman and Gallo-Roman population.
It contained leges and iura, and some of its sources were the Codex Theodosianus, Epitome Gai and Sententiae of Paulus.
The breviary was necessary to clarify law and the only text for trials.

Middle Ages

Period: 527 to 1500

Corpus Iuris Civilis

565

Collection of fundamental works in jurisprudence, issued from 529 to 534 by order of Justinian. It has 4 parts:
·Codex- it's a compilation, by selection and extraction, of imperial enactments to date.
·Digesta- it's an encyclopedia composed of mostly brief extracts from the writings of Roman jurists.
·Instituta- it's a student textbook.
·Novellae- it's a compilation of the latest statutes.
Its four parts thus constitute the foundation documents of the Western legal tradition.

Codex Revisus

580

It's also known as Code of Leovigild and it was a Visigothic legal code, a revision of the Codex Euricianus made in the late sixth century under Leovigild. It's considered the establishment of the true Visigothic Spanish kingdom.
The code does not survive and all we know of it is derived from the writings of Isidore of Seville. This monarch corrected some laws of the Codex of Euric, erased some and added others, promulgated around the year 580, a new edition known as Codex Revisus.

Liber Iudiciorum

654

In 654, some visigoth kings promulgated the Liber Iudiciorum, a set of laws with which they achieved the political and social unification of the kingdom. Recceswinth was the most outstanding of them all.
The code abolished the old tradition of having different laws for Romans and Visigoths, and under it all the subjects of the Visigothic kingdom became hispani. In this way, all subjects of the kingdom were gathered under the same jurisdiction, allowing greater assimilation of the populations.

Age without jurists

Period: 700 to 1200

Period of time in the early Middle Ages in which the proffesion of the jurist had almost completely dissapeared. This is due to a few factors, like the demographic crisis, illiteracy, hunger and epidemics and the lack of teachers or new sources of law.

Irnerius

1050

Irnerius was an Italian jurist and he is called the "lantern of the law". He was the founder of the School of Glossators and thus of the tradition of Medieval Roman Law. His teaching of law was detail-oriented and cumbersome, but arguably of a high legal standard. Special attention was paid to the reading of concrete cases, others were read and dealt with in summary (summae). The first generation of students of Irnerius includes the four doctores Bulgarus, Martinus, Jacobus and Hugo.

Separation of Western and Eastern Churches

1054

Dictatus Papae (Gregory VII)

1075

Gregory's 27-sentence entry in the papal epistolary register between the letters of 3 and 4 March 1075, the recording of the Dictatus papae, is made without any purpose of dissemination to the outside world and accordingly also remains without any tangible resonance among contemporaries. The papal authority demanded therein includes not only the right to appoint bishops, but also the power to depose the emperor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN2rxCieYMs

University of Bologna

1088

The Bologna School was founded in the late 11th century by the eminent jurist Irnerius. It was famous for law from the very beginning. In the early Middle Ages, the sciences of late antiquity and Roman law had almost been forgotten, and only ecclesiastical legal doctrine was passed on. This was sometimes very contradictory, and so Gratian systematised the ecclesiastical legal texts in a uniform collection of laws, the Decretum Gratiani. This awakened interest in learning secular law in Bologna.

Expositiones Petri

1252

Manual studying Justinian’s texts that signified the rediscovering of his work in the early Middle Ages in Italy, a meticulous work made by different glossators. It allowed to preserve Roman Law through history. It centered its focus mainly in the Digest.

Fall of Eastern Empire

1453