The Digest of Justinian, Volume 1

Edited by Alan Watson

Publication Year: 2009

When Justinian became sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 527, he ordered the preparation of three compilations of Roman law that together formed the Corpus Juris Civilis. These works have become known individually as the Code, which collected the legal pronouncements of the Roman emperors, the Institutes, an elementary student's textbook, and the Digest, by far the largest and most highly prized of the three compilations. The Digest was assembled by a team of sixteen academic lawyers commissioned by Justinian in 533 to cull everything of value from earlier Roman law. It was for centuries the focal point of legal education in the West and remains today an unprecedented collection of the commentaries of Roman jurists on the civil law.

Commissioned by the Commonwealth Fund in 1978, Alan Watson assembled a team of thirty specialists to produce this magisterial translation, which was first completed and published in 1985 with Theodor Mommsen's Latin text of 1878 on facing pages. This paperback edition presents a corrected English-language text alone, with an introduction by Alan Watson.

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

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This is a corrected edition, minus the Latin text, of the four-volume The Digest of Jzmtinian, Latin text edited by Theodor Mommsen with the aid of Paul Krueger, English translation edited by Alan Watson, published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This edition incorporates a number of corrected translations. I am grateful to all who called suggested changes to my attention, and in particular to Tony Honore and Olivia ...

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

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pp. xiii-

The compilation of Roman law which was enacted under the Byzantine emperor, Justinian I (c. 482-565), and which, together with that emperor's later laws, subsequently came to be known as the Corpus Juris Civilis has been without doubt the most important and influential collection of secular legal materials that the world has ever known. The compilation preserved Roman law for succeeding generations and ...

GLOSSARY

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pp. xvii-xxx

Acceptilatio (Formal Release). The method by which a creditor freed a debtor from his obligation under a verbal contract [stipulatio q.v.1 producing the same effects as Accessio (Accession). A general term for the acquisition of ownership by joining property to or merging it with something already owned by the acquirer. See 0.41.1. Accusatio (Accusation). The bringing of a criminal charge. Normally (exclusively until ...

HEADINGS / TITLES

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pp. xxxi-

Here the Latin text gives a complete list of the titles in the Digest. Because these are identical (except for slight variations in opening rubrics) to the list of titles in the Table of Contents to the present volumes, they are omitted in the paperback edition. ...

THE COMPOSITION OF THE DIGEST

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pp. xxxiii-xxxvi

Governing under the authority of God our empire which was delivered to us by the Heavenly Majesty, we both conduct wars successfully and render peace honorable, and we uphold the condition of the state. We so lift up our minds toward the help of the omnipotent God that we do not place our trust in weapons or our soldiers or our military leaders or our own talents, but we rest all our hopes in the providence of the ...

THE WHOLE BODY OF LAW

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pp. xxxvii-xli

That the whole body of law of our state has now been reformed and arranged, partly in four books of the Institutes or Elements, partly in fifty of the Digest or Encyclopaedia, and partly in twelve of the imperial constitutiones¹-who knows this better than you do? Everything, indeed, which had to be either ordered at the outset or explained after the completion of the work, with a glad acknowledgment of what ...

THE CONFIRMATION OF THE DIGEST

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pp. xliii-lxii

So great is the providence of the Divine Humanity toward us that it ever deigns to sustain us with acts of eternal generosity. For after the Parthian wars were stilled in everlasting peace, after the Vandal nation was done away with and Carthagenay rather, the whole of Libya-was once more received into the Roman empire, the Divine Humanity contrived that the ancient laws, already encumbered with old age, ...