Roman Law

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A body of civil law (ius civile), praetorian law and jurists' commentary that gave the empire a portable, professional dispute-resolution system. Its practical importance to governance is that it let a very small administration devolve routine adjudication to local magistrates and provincial governors working from shared categories: contract, property, inheritance, status. It was codified late - the Theodosian Code (438) and Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis (529-534) - which means the classical law we read is largely a 6th-century editorial reconstruction of earlier jurists.