gitimate authority,
and alone were admitted to the tribunals or taught in the schools. The
rescripts of the early emperors recognized too many popular rights to
suit the despotic character of Justinian; and the older jurists, like
the Scaevolas, Sulpicius, and Labeo, were distasteful from their
sympathy with free institutions. Different opinions have been expressed
by the jurisconsults as to the merits of the Justinian collection. By
some it is regarded as a vast mass of legal lumber; by others, as a
beautiful monument of human labor. After the lapse of so many centuries
it is certain that a large portion of it is of no practical utility,
since it is not applicable to modern wants. But again, no one doubts
that it has exercised a great and good influence on moral and political
science, and introduced many enlightened views concerning the
administration of justice as well as the nature of civil government, and
thus has modified the codes of the Teutonic nations that sprang up on
the ruins of the old Roman world. It was used in the Greek empire until
the fall of Constantinople. It never entirely lost authority in Italy,
although it remained buried for centuries, till the discovery of the
Florentine copy of the Pandects at the siege of Amalfi in 1135. Peter
Valence, in the eleventh century, made use of it in a law-book which he
published.

With the rise of the Italian cities, the study of Roman law revived, and
Bologna became the seat from which it spread over Europe. In the
sixteenth century the science of theoretical law passed from Italy to
France, under the auspices of Francis I., when Cujas, or Cujacius,
became the great ornament of the school of Bourges and the greatest
commentator on Roman law until Dumoulin appeared. Grotius, in Holland,
excited the same interest in civil law that Dumoulin did in France,
followed by eminent professors in Leyden and the German universities. It
was reserved for Pothier, in the middle of the eighteenth century, to
reduce the Roman law to systematic order,--one of the most gigantic
tasks that ever taxed the industry of man. The recent discoveries,
especially that made by Niebuhr of the long-lost work of Gaius, have
given a great impulse to the study of Roman law in Germany; and to this
impulse no one has contributed so greatly as Savigny of Berlin.

The great importance of the subject demands a more minute notice of the
principles of the Roman law than the limits of this work properly