Legal Education and the Civil Law System

tenets are: (i) civil law is largely codified; 5 (ii) legal scholars are usually responsible for creating, writing, and interpreting the law; 6 and (iii) civil law rules are prioritized.7 A. Roman Law: Codification and Interpretation of the LawRoman law in the early years of the Roman Republic was administered under the authority of two magistrates.8 These magistrates would issue edicts that provided general rules applicable to certain fact patterns taken from conflicts brought to them for resolution.9 As the magistrates were replaced, new magistrates would maintain significant portions of previous edicts, preserving a sense of continuity and stability.10 These edicts formed laws that legal scholars, the jurisconsults, interpreted and used to provide legal advice to private parties and even magistrates themselves.11 Besides introducing the concept of jurisconsults, Roman law's other contribution to contemporary civil law is known as the Body of Civil Law (Corpus Iuris Civilis), adopted between 533 and 536 CE. 12 Although this collection of works is sometimes referred to as the Justinian Code because it was prepared at Emperor Justinian I's instigation, the Code is only one part of the Body of Civil Law, which is comprised of four separate works.13 The Digest (533 CE) summarized all of the classical jurists' writings on law and justice up to that point in time.14 The Code (534 CE) compiled the actual laws of the empire, citing legislation and pronouncements.15 The Institutes (535 CE) was a smaller work, intended as a textbook for law students, that summarized and categorized sections of the Digest.16 In 556 CE, Roman legal scholars wrote a fourth work, the Novella, which was not part of Justinian's project.17 Justinian did not allow commentaries on his code, 18 but this prohibition proved 5.