Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 70

MODERN AGE

In Prussia, Monroe's unspoken target was
Frederick William III, the third in succession
to Frederick the Great, who had died child-
less. Frederick the Great had begun to com-
pile the Prussian civil code, the Allgemeines
Landrecht, promulgated by his successor,
Frederick William II, in 1796. The Prussian
code, with legendary Prussian thoroughness,
attempted to cover every conceivable admin-
istrative and criminal topic with seventeen
thousand paragraphs. The intent was to set
out a legal model of the perfect state and to
forestall judicial decisions based on the past.
In Austria, Empress Maria Theresa in 1760
set in motion a group of legal scholars with a
similar project, namely, to compile the General Civil Code, the Allgemeines Bürgerliches
Gesetzbuch. The code was finished and
promulgated in 1812 under Francis I, the
archduke of Austria, who had taken the title
emperor in 1804.
In France, the first consul and soon to be
emperor had imposed the influential Code
Napoleon in 1804, but by the time of the
Monroe Doctrine, the exiled Napoleon had
already died on St. Helena two years earlier.

T

he idea that new laws should be imposed
by the emperor was not a new idea with
the Enlightenment. It was just a new twist
on a process that purported to go back to the
Roman Empire. The most primitive example
of Roman law was "the Law of the Twelve
Tables," actually engraved on bronze tablets
in the Roman Forum about 450 BC. The
last codification of Roman law took place
in 532 AD in Byzantium. By that time, the
western empire had disintegrated under bar-
barian invasions, civil wars, and contending
factions. Justinian I, sometimes called "the
Great," ruled from Byzantium.
Justinian was the last Roman emperor
whose native language was Latin. Because of
the collapse of the western empire, Justinian
70

FALL 2014

ordered his quaestor, Tribonian, to compile
a new codification of Roman law. Justinian's
action set the pattern that became a key
component of Roman and civil law: the legal
system should be drawn up afresh by groups
of unelected experts, without input from
representatives of the people. A quaestor was
a kind of legal adviser, perhaps not unlike
a modern attorney general. Tribonian obvi-
ously presided over a group of specialists
because the Corpus Juris Civilis amounted to
four large volumes. The most famous was the
Digest, a rewriting of previous law, and the
Pandects, a systematic compilation of Justin-
ian's own edicts.
Justinian ruled as a despot, a word that
technically means someone who rules with
all power in his hands. The essential feature
of civil law was that it was a framework
decreed for the reform of society. The second
feature was that it was intended to replace
all previous laws or customs. It rejected prec-
edent. No judge was allowed to decide a case
on any other basis than on the new texts.
It is not clear from history how effec-
tively the Justinian code was implemented
throughout the empire. Most local com-
munities depended upon local lawgivers and
the customs of their region. But the lamp of
learning was kept burning by the commu-
nity of scholars gathered in the monasteries
and religious institutions that preserved and
copied ancient manuscripts. These gather-
ings of scholars in medieval cities were to
create the modern university.
One of the earliest universities was estab-
lished in Bologna in 1088, dedicated, many
believe, solely to the recovery and analysis of
the Justinian code. The scholars who were
analyzing and writing commentaries on the
Pandects were training students who became
a body of legal technicians who spread their
program throughout Europe. The influence
of civil law dominated the major centers
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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