Changes

__NOTOC__

“''Jus eat ars boni et aqua''” – the law is the art of goodness and equity. That is how Roman’s jurist Celsus defined law. This definition represents and encompasses the desires of Roman people and their will to create and implement laws, a desire that indeed managed to comprehensively cross the barriers of time and reach out to the modern world as we know it today. Roman law is the stable foundation on which modern legal culture has developed and evolved upon as a whole. The Civil law system <ref>also known as Continental European law system</ref> is based on the late Roman law and its most distinctive feature - that its core principles are codified into a system which servers as the primary source of law.

Subsequently, by blending the old outdated laws with the new laws of the Roman empire, emperor Justinian I effectively cleansed and updated the Roman law thus selecting only those rules that had real practical value of the time leaving behind all obsolete principles and postulates. The first book of the so-called Corpus Juris Civilis is the Codex Constitutionum. It represents a selection of the imperial constitutions that had some practical value or their provisions were adapted to the circumstances of Justinian’s own time. The second book or a set of book volumes consists of 50 more book volumes that became known as Digest (Digesta) or Pandects (Pandectae). They contained a selection of the writings of the jurists and were pronounced to be a law book and no other jurist’s writings could be cited any more. At about the same time the Institutes of Justinian was published. It contained an outline of the elements of the Roman law. The last book is known as the New constitutions or the Novels and consists of ordinances issued by the emperor himself.

==Further development and contributions of the West==