Civil (Roman) Law

Abstract

The Roman law was fundamental to medieval civilization – it was the greatest legacy of the Roman Empire. It was known through Justinian’s codification, the Corpus iuris civilis. The systematic study of Roman law began at the University of Bologna toward the end of the eleventh century. The first school of Roman law jurists was that of the Glossators, followed by that of the Commentators. A combined ius commune jurisprudence including both civil and canon law developed. The Commentators sought to accommodate Roman law to their own society. Most of the Corpus iuris was concerned with private law but medieval jurists made major contributions to the language of government and politics. Both monarchical and republican elements existed in Roman law. The divine source of the emperor’s power was stressed, as was also its popular origin. The jurists considered the problem of how the Roman Republic had been legitimately succeeded by the Empire. The notion persisted that the emperor’s power was limited because it derived from the law. Custom preserved the notion of popular consent. Medieval jurists faced the problem of universal and territorial sovereignty, producing theories of the sovereignty of both kings and city-republics. Medieval jurists treated natural law and the law of peoples (ius gentium) as higher norms based on reason. There was a wide range of treatments of the relationship between temporal and spiritual power. The medieval scholastic treatment of Roman law was not supplanted by the sixteenth-century humanist approach but coexisted with it. In jurisprudence, as in other areas, scholasticism and humanism were both characteristic of Renaissance intellectual life.