Justinian's Institutes was one part of his effort to codify Roman law and to reform legal education, of which the Digest also was a part. Whereas the Digest was to be used by advanced law students, Justinian's Institutes was to be a textbook for new students. The need for a new text for first year students was addressed as early as 530 in the constitution "Deo auctore," where reference is made to something "...which may be promulgated to replace the elementary works, so that the raw intelligence of the student, nourished by a simple diet, may proceed more easily to advanced legal studies." Under the supervision of Tribonian, two law professors were assigned to extract statements about the basic institutions of Roman law from the teaching books created by writers of "authority". The bulk of this new Institutes is the Institutes of Gaius, much of it taken verbatim; but it also uses material from the Institutes of Marcian, Florentinus, Ulpian, and perhaps Paulus, they carried the force of law. First year law students used Justinian's Institutes as their textbook for centuries.
Structure and content
The Institutes of Justinian is arranged much like Gaius's work, being divided into three books covering "persons," "things,", and "actions." Unlike the Digest, the extracts do not provide inscriptions indicating from whom the original material was taken.
Modern editions and translations
Justinian's Institutes was largely unknown in the West, however, after the decline of the Western Roman Empire. The earliest known manuscript are fragments of a Veronese palimpsest of the ninth century. The first printed edition of Justinian's Institutes was Petrus Schoyff's in 1468. Scholars using the Veronese palimpsest suggested changes to the existing text, and these criticisms resulted in the definitive texts by Paul Krüger and Eduard Huschke in 1867 and 1868 respectively. The most frequently used modern version of Justinian's Institutes is that of Krüger, which is in volume one of the Krüger, Mommsen, Kroll and Schoell stereotype edition. There are several translations of Justinian's Institutes into English, the better of the older ones being those of J.B. Moyle and Thomas Collett Sandars. More recent translations by Birks & McLeod are also available as facing editions with Krüger's Latin. Samuel Parsons Scott translated the Institutes into English as part of his translation of the entire "Corpus Juris Civilis," but his translation has not been well received.
