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{{Mediawiki[[File:kindleoasis}}Berner_Iustitia.jpg|thumbnail|250px|left|Statue of Lady Justice in Bern, Switzerland]]
Moreover, Roman law is the common foundation upon which the European legal order is built. Therefore, it serves as a source of rules and legal norms which easily blend within the European countries own national laws. Roman law is not only effectively mixed in the widely used common law and continental law norms and practices, but its set of fundamental principles and/or established rules pre-defines, shapes and provides law sources in accordance to which states are governed in general. Nowadays, these rules altogether make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is all about and what is also commonly referred to as Nations’ Constitutions <ref>i.e. Nation Main Law(s)</ref>.
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“''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Subsequently, by blending the old outdated laws with the new laws of the Roman empire, emperor Justinian I effectively cleansed and updated the Roman law thus selecting only those rules that had real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.
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==Further development and contributions of the West==
Today Roman law has been replaced by modern codes. These codes were created by transmitting <ref>i.e. transposing</ref> the rules of Roman law and placing them in a framework which provided a modern, systematic order. This is particularly true in regards to the German Civil Code and is equally true in regard to the most modern European legal systems and Constitutions. However, some Roman rules were implemented directly and even today they apply to all of us. For example the fact that we can return faulty purchases to the shop during a certain “grace” period of time has a Roman origin. At the time of Justinian this principle was extended to all contracts and as such was taken by some European legal systems.
Truly, the Roman Empire may have left countless marks on the modern Western world, though, its greatest contribution to it is its law. It still has a very direct influence today and we can derive the conclusion that Rome’s main legacy is in the field of law, because Roman law has had an enormous influence on the development of law in Europe and in what is referred to as Continental Law in general. It’s no coincidence then that Roman law remains a compulsory subject in our law faculties and modern studies. We still refer to that very same old Roman law all the time even today. And last, but in no way least, it’s then vital to note that – while in all other fields the influences are mixed <ref>i.e philosophy and architecture also have Greek influences</ref>, and apart from Latin language obviously – law is the only contribution to the modern world that is derived solely from ancient Rome.
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