From 529 to 534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up until that point, so that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of authorized texts from earlier than. As one authorized historian wrote, “Justinian consciously looked again to the golden age of Roman law and aimed to restore it to the peak it had reached three centuries before.” The Justinian Code remained in pressure within the East until the autumn of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, meanwhile, relied on a combine of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law till the Justinian Code was rediscovered within the eleventh century, which scholars at the University of Bologna used to interpret their very own laws. Civil law codifications based closely on Roman law, alongside some influences from non secular laws such as canon law, continued to unfold all through Europe until the Enlightenment.
- Richard Posner, University