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22.15
Legal History 400 - 1220
  
     
  Just as Roman Citizenship and the twelve tables were "high points" in legal reform, the Corpus Juris Civilis represents probably the lowest point in legal history.  
  This work of ignorance, hate and religious insanity took everything that was once good about the Roman Empire and produced a code that entrenched the world into darkness for over seven hundred years.  
 
 Key legal concept: Corpus Juris Civilis (529-534)
Architect
Emperor Justinian I, Byzantine Empire (reign 527-565)
Main influence
 Codex Theodosianus, Codex Gregorianus and Codex Hermogenianus.
Idea
 The position of the emperor as an absolute monarch with unlimited legislative, executive and judicial power. Religious organisation (Christianity) and its clergy immune "above" the law. Forfeiture of citizen rights and natural law on the basis of religious belief (if non-Christian). State right to torture and burn people to death on the basis of non-Christian belief. Establishment of Servitus Judaeorum (Servitude of the Jews) - jew as a second class people, with little/no rights. Perpetual slavery- no right of slaves of those born into slavery to rise above their position.

 
  The Corpus Juris Civilis became the legal basis for the laws of European nations, emerging out of the enforced Christian darkness around the 12th and 13th Century. It gave the foundations to the legal framework that most Christian nations still employ today- that the Vatican is above all laws and accountable to no person, that torture, murder and racism is legal under certain conditions and that the rights of individuals is conditional rather than inalienable.  
     
 
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