Institutes of Justinian
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“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.”--Institutes of Justinian () by J. B. Moyle |
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The Institutes of Justinian (Institutiones Justiniani) is a unit of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the sixth-century codification of Roman law ordered by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. It is largely based upon the Institutes of Gaius, a Roman jurist of the second century A.D. The other units in the Corpus Juris Civilis are the Digest, the Codex Justinianus, and the Novellae Constitutiones ("New Constitutions" or "Novels").
Modern editions and translations
Justinian's Institutes was largely unknown in the West, however, after the decline of the Western Roman Empire. The earliest known manuscript are fragments of a Veronese palimpsest of the ninth century. The first printed edition of Justinian's Institutes was Petrus Schoyff's in 1468. Scholars using the Veronese palimpsest suggested changes to the existing text, and these criticisms resulted in the definitive texts by Paul Krüger and Eduard Huschke in 1867 and 1868 respectively. The most frequently used modern version of Justinian's Institutes is that of Krüger, which is in volume one of the Krüger, Mommsen, Kroll and Schoell stereotype edition.
There are several translations of Justinian's Institutes into English, the better of the older ones being those of J.B. Moyle and Thomas Collett Sandars. More recent translations by Birks & McLeod are also available as facing editions with Krüger's Latin. Samuel Parsons Scott translated the Institutes into English as part of his translation of the entire "Corpus Juris Civilis," but his translation has not been well received.
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