tutions for their newly erected kingdoms. For Justinian
commanded only in the eastern remains of the empire; and it was under
his auspices, that the present body of civil law was compiled and
finished by Tribonian and other lawyers, about the year 533.

[Footnote t: _l._ 3. _c._ 34.]

[Footnote u: Taylor's elements of civil law. 17.]

THIS consists of, 1. The institutes, which contain the elements or
first principles of the Roman law, in four books. 2. The digests, or
pandects, in fifty books, containing the opinions and writings of
eminent lawyers, digested in a systematical method. 3. A new code, or
collection of imperial constitutions, the lapse of a whole century
having rendered the former code, of Theodosius, imperfect. 4. The
novels, or new constitutions, posterior in time to the other books,
and amounting to a supplement to the code; containing new decrees of
successive emperors, as new questions happened to arise. These form
the body of Roman law, or _corpus juris civilis_, as published about
the time of Justinian: which however fell soon into neglect and
oblivion, till about the year 1130, when a copy of the digests was
found at Amalfi in Italy; which accident, concurring with the policy
of the Romish ecclesiastics[w], suddenly gave new vogue and authority
to the civil law, introduced it into several nations, and occasioned
that mighty inundation of voluminous comments, with which this system
of law, more than any other, is now loaded.

[Footnote w: See Sec. 1. pag. 18.]

THE canon law is a body of Roman ecclesiastical law, relative to such
matters as that church either has, or pretends to have, the proper
jurisdiction over. This is compiled from the opinions of the antient
Latin fathers, the decrees of general councils, the decretal epistles
and bulles of the holy see. All which lay in the same disorder and
confusion as the Roman civil law, till about the year 1151, one
Gratian an Italian monk, animated by the discovery of Justinian's
pandects at Amalfi, reduced them into some method in three books,
which he entitled _concordia discordantium canonum_, but which are
generally known by the name of _decretum Gratiani_. These reached as
low as the time of pope Alexander III. The subsequent papal decrees,
to the pontificate of Gregory IX, were published in much the same
method under the auspices of that pope, about the year 1230, in five
books entitled _decretalia Gregorii noni_. A sixth book was added by
Bon