Decisions weren’t revealed in any systematic means, so any case law that developed was disguised and almost unrecognised. Each case was to be determined afresh from the legal guidelines of the State, which mirrors the unimportance of judges’ decisions for future cases in civil law techniques right now. From 529 to 534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up till that point, in order that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of authorized texts from before. As one legal historian wrote, “Justinian consciously looked back to the golden age of Roman law and aimed to revive it to the height it had reached three centuries earlier than.” The Justinian Code remained in pressure within the East till the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, in the meantime, relied on a combination of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law till the Justinian Code …
