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which the human will can operate. These are, in brief, one's own person, and the external world; the latter again being divided into reasonable and unreasonable, or persons and things.

As regards one's own person, our attention is at once directed to the so-called primordial rights, or rights of personal inviolability in respect of freedom, reputation, and so forth. These, however, apart and by themselves, Savigny does not consider a proper subject of law. He admits that a man ought to have the sole control of his own person and powers, but the right to such control does not fall within the ken of the law except as the basis of rights and relations which belong to other parts of the code-which, that is to say, ought not to be regarded simply as developments of this personal inviolability, from which their context is clearly distinguishable (System i. p. 336-7). 'Acquired rights' are thus the only proper subject of private law, and these, as has been pointed out, can relate to either persons or things. i. Over unreasonable portions of the external world, or things, a person may exercise absolute control. Such absolute control is called dominion or ownership, and the law relating to it is known as the law of things (Sachenrecht). Ownership, however, is capable of many forms and modifications; the separation of its elements leads to the conception of servitudes and other rights in re aliena; and again, its actual exercise is distinguishable from the right, whence arises the law relating to Possession. The main elements of the law of things will thus be Ownership, iura in re aliena, and Possession.

ii. To the reasonable portion of the external world, or to other persons, one may stand in either of two quite different relations. Firstly, one man may be related to another somewhat in the way in which, as we have seen, he may be related to things. Over a thing he may exercise complete dominion, in which case it is absolutely subjected to his will; over a person he cannot exercise this power, which implies an entire negation of freedom and personality. But he may exercise a partial dominion, a dominion which consists with that other person's freedom, inasmuch as it does not extend to all his actions, but only to one or some of them. If one man is absolutely subjected to the will of another, he is, jurally, not a person, but a thing; but if that other is, jurally, master of only certain of his actions, and jurally entitled to compel him to this or that act or forbearance only, he is, except in respect of this portion of his activity, still free and a person. We thus get the idea of obligation as distinct from dominion, and these together form the two parts of what is called the law of property, the relation between them being twofold: (a) if one person refuses to

perform the act which he is bound to perform in favour of another, the law will condemn him to pay pecuniary damages, the obligation being thus transformed into ownership (of money): (6) the object of the vast majority of obligations is the acquisition or the transitory enjoyment of dominion. But, secondly, one man may be related to another as being, along with him, a member of the organic whole, humanity. In obligation a person is regarded as an individual atom, standing apart by himself; here he is regarded as a being incomplete, and finding his completeness in the great interconnection of nature. This is especially observable in two points: (a) the distinction of the sexes, whose incompleteness is perfected in marriage: and (b) the limited duration of human life; and here the deficiency is supplied by the perpetuation of the race, which leads us to the idea of the periods of human life, infancy, puberty, manhood, etc., and the connected theme of education, with the control of one person by another which this implies. These are grouped together under the idea of parental power, with which is intimately connected the notion of kinship. Marriage, parental power, and kinship form together a department of the private code which we may call family law.

We can thus picture to ourselves three concentric circles, within which the human will can exercise its supremacy: (i) The original self, the so-called rights to which are not, according to Savigny, properly subjects of jurisprudence. (ii) The self expanded in the family; the legal relations comprised under this belonged to family law. (iii) The external world apart from the family; the rights which arise from the relations to this of the individual will belong to property law, in its two departments, law of things, and law of obligations. Though however the field of private law has thus been mapped out into three great departments, family law, law of things, and law of obligations, with their three great corresponding classes of rights, these can be thus sharply separated only in abstraction, and a further development is accordingly desirable in two directions. Firstly, the rights and duties which arise from many legal relations seem to belong, for some reasons, to family law, for others to the law of property; that is to say, there are some forms of ownership and of obligation which cannot exist apart from the family, and which in fact are of supreme importance in investing the family with a jural character. In the Roman law, for instance, the institutions of dos, donatio propter nuptias, peculium, patronatus, and the contractual relations enforced by the actiones adiectitiae qualitatis' are of this character. Legal relations of this kind may with convenience be classed by themselves

under the head of applied (as distinct from pure) family law. Secondly, the relation of the law of inheritance or succession to the classification so far suggested is by no means clear. If, however, we ask what is comprised in the idea of an inheritance, the reply must be, the relations. of the deceased person in the departments of ownership and obligation, or, as the Romans significantly expressed it, his universitas iuris; his successor takes his property, and has to pay his debts. The law of succession is thus a division of the law of property, but its importance in all legal systems forbids our making it a merely subordinate division. Rather, we should divide the latter into simultaneous and successive property law; the former comprising the law of things and the law of obligations, the latter the law of inheritance.

The field of private law then comprises five great departments :i. Pure family law, including marriage, parental power, kinship, and the relation of guardian and ward.

ii. Applied family law.

iii. The law of things, under its three main heads of ownership, possession, and iura in re aliena.

iv. The law of obligations.

v. The law of inheritance.

It must not be supposed that this is the classification of the Roman lawyers; it is one which Savigny arrives at by an a priori method, and, so far as we know, there was not one among the prudentes who in his systematic writings arranged his subject-matter upon this principle. The reason why the outlines of Savigny's system have been so fully considered is, partly, to suggest to the reader an alternative classification to that of the analytical school, partly to show how complete the Institutes of Justinian, and their model the Commentaries of Gaius, are in their material if not in their formal treatment of private law. Marriage, parental power, kinship, and guardianship are treated with great fulness in Book i. Applied family law forms no compact, independent part of the work, but is found, to some extent, distributed among the other departments. Thus, though dos is not explicitly treated, donatio propter nuptias is discussed as one of the forms of gift in Book ii. Title 7. The capacity of a filiusfamilias (a) to own property independently of his pater is noticed in Book ii. Titles 9. 11, and 12; (b) to bind his pater by his contracts in Book iv. Title 7: his position in respect of delict is the subject of Title 8 in the same book; the relation of patron and freedman, though only with reference to the former's rights of succession to the latter, is treated in Book iii. Title 7; the effect of adoption on the property and debts of the

adopted in Book iii. Title 10. Ownership and iura in re aliena are comprised in Book ii. Titles 1 to 9; possession is touched upon incidentally only, in connection with usucapion (Book ii. Title 6) and interdicts (Book iv. Title 15). Obligations, under the heads of contract and quasi-contract, delict and quasi-delict, occupy Book iii. Title 13 to Book iv. Title 5; and inheritance, testate and intestate, with the cognate topics of legacy and fidei commissum, is the subject of Book ii. Title 10 to Book iii. Title 9. The consideration of the arrangement adopted by Justinian himself after Gaius is reserved for the introductions to the separate books, in which too the reader's attention will be called to the chief particulars in which the law of Justinian had advanced upon that of Gaius, or in which the rules stated by the latter had become obsolete, and thus a mere matter of antiquarian learning, in the age of the former.

The Institutes were published on Nov. 21, A.D. 533, with statutory force, along with the Digest, from Dec. 30th of the same year. At the same time Justinian fixed the system of study to be in future followed in the public schools of law. The course was to occupy five years. The first was to be devoted to the Institutes and the first four books (рŵτα) of the Digest; the second, to the parts of the latter relating to iudicia and res creditae (Books 5-19), and also to certain portions of later books dealing with the proprietary relations of husband and wife, guardian and ward, and testaments and legacies. In the third year Books 20-22 of the Digest were to be studied, and also certain portions to be gone over again which had been already read in the preceding year. These were to be followed, in the fourth year, by the parts of Books 20-36 which had not already engaged the student's attention. The subjects prescribed for the last year of the course were Books 37-50 of the Digest, and the Code; these were read privately, so that the subject-matter of the professorial lectures, which spread themselves over the first four years, was the Institutes and the first thirty-six books of the Digest.

Justinian's design had been to embrace in his three authoritative works every jot and tittle of positive law. It was transparent, however, as things stood at the end of A.D. 533, that this object had not been fully attained. The Digest and the Institutes, from the point of view of the legal reformer of that epoch, left little to be desired; but it was at once perceived that the Code of A.D. 529 was far from complete; the great majority of Justinian's own constitutions had been issued subsequently to its promulgation, and Tribonian, who had not been president, but merely an ordinary member of the commission which had compiled

it, was naturally not backward in calling his master's attention to this imperfection. Justinian, therefore, in A.D. 534, appointed a new commission, consisting of Tribonian, as president, and four others, to revise the Code of A.D. 529. Within a few months the latter, and also the constitutions issued after its enactment, were deprived of all authority, and withdrawn from circulation, their place being taken by a new Code, known as the 'codex repetitae praelectionis,' in which were incorporated Justinian's own constitutions, as well as many others which. the earlier Code had not contained: some again which had stood in the latter were now omitted, and there were numerous alterations and interpolations, Tribonian sparing no pains to make the revision as complete as possible. The codex repetitae praelectionis was promulgated on Nov. 16, 534, with statutory force from the ensuing 29th of December. It consisted of twelve books, and in arrangement followed very closely the order of the Digest.

The adversaries of codification have made great capital out of an error into which its advocates have sometimes fallen, and which consists in supposing that a good Code dispenses with the necessity of any further legislation; they have even accused Justinian of believing that in his three great bodies of law was summed up the perfection of human wisdom, and that they would suffice, without addition or alteration, to determine for all time the rights and duties of his subjects. It is quite certain that Justinian never believed anything of the kind. His main purpose had been to set the law upon a solid foundation, and to cast it in a form which his successors would not lightly venture to alter; by the completeness of his work he hoped to endow his subjects with the inestimable blessing of a legal system pruned of all relics of antiquity, adequate in substance, and so judiciously arranged as to reduce the necessity of future change to a minimum. But within five years to have entirely recast a large portion of his own work might well arouse the suspicion, that the law had lost all its old stability; that the legislature had become too active; that as the first Code had been thrust aside to make room for a second, so the second would soon be swept away in favour of a third, and that in the confusion which such constant change could not fail to produce the manysided security which all law is intended to guarantee would cease to exist. In his publication of the codex repetitae praelectionis Justinian deemed it necessary to disarm all fear of such a tendency. He expressly recognised the probability, if not the necessity, of subsequent change, and enacted that constitutions issued after the publication of the Code should be formed into a distinct collection, under the title of

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