The First Code

On 13 February ad 528, Justinian, by means of the Constitutio Haec, entrusted a ten-member commission chaired by the quaestor sacri palatii with the task of consolidating all the valid imperial constitutions into a single code.

The commission consisted of seven senior state officials that embraced Tribonian, who was then magister officiorum; two distinguished advocates; and Theophilus, a professor at the law school of Constantinople. The commissioners were instructed to draft a collection of imperial enactments by drawing on the Gregorian, Hermogenian and Theodosian Codes, and on the constitutions issued between ad 438 and 529. They were empowered to delete outdated or superfluous elements from the texts, eliminate contradictions and repetitions, and effect any necessary amendments to update the material. The constitutions were to be arranged systematically according to the subject matter and listed in chronological order under appropriate titles. The new collection was published on 7 April 529 under the name Codex Iustinianus and came into force on 16 April 529 (by virtue of the Constitutio Summa rei publicae). It replaced all earlier codes, and any omitted imperial enactments could not be quoted in the courts of law (with a few exceptions). As imperial constitutions were copiously issued after 529, this first code was soon outdated and replaced in 534 by a revised edition. The only surviving material from Justinian’s original code (designated Codex vetus, the old Code) is an index discovered on a fragment of papyrus in Egypt during the early nineteenth century.^{^[596]}

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Source: Mousourakis G.. Roman Law and the Origins of the Civil Law Tradition. Springer,2015. — 339 p.. 2015

The First Code

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