From 529 to 534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up till that point, so that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of legal texts from earlier than. As one authorized historian wrote, “Justinian consciously seemed 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 pressure within the East until the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, meanwhile, relied on a combination of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law till the Justinian Code was rediscovered in the 11th century, and students on the University of Bologna used it to interpret their very own legal guidelines. Both these codes influenced closely not only the law techniques of the countries in continental Europe (e.g. Greece), but additionally the Japanese and Korean legal traditions.

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