The Law Society
Decisions were not revealed in any systematic method, so any case law that developed was disguised and virtually unrecognised. Each case was to be determined afresh from the laws of the State, which mirrors the unimportance of judges’ decisions for future circumstances in civil law systems today. From 529 to 534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up till that point, in order that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of legal texts from earlier than. As one legal historian wrote, “Justinian consciously looked back to the golden age of Roman law and aimed to restore it to the peak it had reached three centuries earlier than.” The Justinian Code remained in force in the East until the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, in the meantime, relied on a combination of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law until …