into the pure nothingness
of the so-called law of nature, but was applied by definite
functionaries for definite concrete cases according to fixed rules,
and was not merely capable of, but had already essentially received,
a legal embodiment in the urban edict. This code moreover corresponded
in matter to the wants of the time, in so far as it furnished
the more convenient forms required by the increase of intercourse
for legal procedure, for acquisition of property, and for conclusion
of contracts. Lastly, it had already in the main become subsidiary law
throughout the compass of the Roman empire, inasmuch as--
while the manifold local statutes were retained for those legal relations
which were not directly commercial, as well as for local transactions
between members of the same legal district--dealings relating
to property between subjects of the empire belonging to different
legal districts were regulated throughout after the model
of the urban edict, though not applicable de jure to these cases,
both in Italy and in the provinces. The law of the urban edict
had thus essentially the same position in that age which the Roman law
has occupied in our political development; this also is, so far as
such opposites can be combined, at once abstract and positive;
this also recommended itself by its (compared with the earlier
legal code) flexible forms of intercourse, and took its place by the side
of the local statutes as universal subsidiary law. But the Roman
legal development had an essential advantage over ours in this,
that the denationalized legislation appeared not, as with us,
prematurely and by artificial birth, but at the right time
and agreeably to nature.

Caesar's Project of Codification

Such was the state of the law as Caesar found it. If he projected
the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to say what were
his intentions. This code could only comprehend the law of Roman
burgesses, and could be a general code for the empire merely so far as
a code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not
but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass
of the empire. In criminal law, if the plan embraced this at all,
there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan
ordinances. In civil law, for a state whose nationality
was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape
was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown
out of law