A corpus juris is a complete collection of laws governing a country, jurisdiction, or district. It includes statute and statutory or codified jurisprudence, and different categories of law such as civil, criminal, administrative, and international policies. The first substantial corpus juris is the Corpus Iurus Civilis, created by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in AD 529 to codify the legal system that had evolved throughout the Roman Republic and Empire.
The legal term “corpus juris” refers to the complete collection of laws governing a particular country, nation, jurisdiction or district. The term comes from the Latin phrase corpus ius, which translates to “body of law.” Most nations around the world maintain a written corpus juris as the basis for their legal system.
In most cases, a corpus juris or legislative body consists of statute and statutory or codified jurisprudence. Statutory laws are created by a country’s legislators, but by their nature they tend to be subjective and generally unable to settle all legal questions without interpretation. For this reason, many nations appoint councils or judges to interpret statutory provisions. These interpretations provide a precedent for future legal issues, so they are incorporated into the country’s corpus juris.
A corpus juris also includes different categories of law such as civil law, criminal law, administrative law and international policies. These categories are often divided into subcategories. For example, civil law is often composed of contract law, tort and property law, while criminal law involves citizens’ fundamental rights or ‘constitutional law’, the types of actions that could result in a criminal penalty and the specific procedures involved in prosecuting a defendant. A corpus juris could also belong to more than one nation. For example, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) is the governing body of a number of countries engaged in international trade.
The first substantial corpus juris is the Corpus Iurus Civilis. This codified body of law was created by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in the year AD 529. This particular corpus juris, also known as the Justinian Code, was an attempt to codify the legal system that had evolved throughout the Roman Republic and l ‘Roman Empire .
Before the creation of the Justinian Code, the Roman legal system lacked uniformity and organization. In the early days of the Roman Republic, government officials were sent to individual villages to settle disputes between the villagers. Recurring disputes were written down and used to compose the Twelve Tables, a list of legal rules and their solutions. Justinian codified these legal norms together with judicial interpretations and his own mandates on citizens’ rights in a voluminous written collection. The Justinian Code was later taught to legal scholars at the University of Bologna in Italy and is believed to have had a major impact on the creation and evolution of many of the legal systems that exist in the world today.
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