Gaius And Justinian Analysis

Classical Roman law was a mass of law and precedent that was difficult to navigate even for the lawyers of the time. This often led to the need for compilations of law, such as the Codex Theodisius and the Codex Justinianus. The well-documented nature of these law codes allows historians to make sound comparisons between them. The Institutes of Gaius was a legal textbook for beginning law students written in about 161 AD. A comparable text, the Institutes of Justinian, provides explanation of the laws being compiled on order by Justinian during the 6th century AD. Both texts provide a source to study the specific facets of law during those time periods. By using the Institutes of Gaius, translated by Francis De Zulueta and the Institutes

For example, The Institutes of Gaius outlines what crimes fall into the category of delict, and the nature of each crime. Gaius writes that a delict comes in four forms, theft robbery, damage to property, and injury to a person. He further explains that theft has two types, manifest, and nonmanifest. Manifest is described as a theft in which the thief is caught before he leaves the premises of the crime and nonmanifest as “what is not manifest.” He explains that some legal scholars believe that manifest theft should be extended to situations in which the thief is caught with the stolen object before he arrives at the place that he planned to bring it and dismisses this opinion. In the Institutes of Justinian, the legal scholars who compile the work describe the same concepts, manifest and non-manifest, under the names detected in commission and simple theft, respectively. They side with the opinion that Gaius opposes, and assert that theft detected in commission does in fact include theft that has been stopped after the thief has left the premises of the crime, but before he has arrived at the place which he intended to go with the stolen object. By using legal histories like that of Wolfgang Kunkel, I may able to adequately compare discrepancies like the one mentioned above in their historical context. For further comparisons between legal codes, a translation of the Codex Theodosius may be obtained from the FAU