to exclude from the Digest what was obsolete, meaning in large measure the rules that had been replaced by imperial constitutions which were now collected in the Code. The third part of the compilation is the Institutes, an elementary textbook for first-year students, which was planned fromand was published on November , . It is structured on theInstitutes of Gaius, a work written about A.D., and appears in four books, though unlike Gaius’ Institutes, the books are further subdivided into titles. The arrangement of topics - sources of law, persons, property, succession, obligations, law of actions - for which the credit should probably be given to Gaius, was the result of planning, and it differs markedly from the arrangement found in the Digest, which seems haphazard and is largely the unplanned result of the gradual growth of topics as they were rather unsystematically set out annually by the praetor in the later Roman republic and early empire. The absence of a satisfactory arrangement in the Digest has long been a matter for unfavorable comment. Like the other parts of theCorpus Iuris, the Institutes is statute law. With the second Code, Justinian’s work of codifying Roman law was complete. But he continued to legislate, and this subsequent legislation is now known as the Novels. No official collection of these constitutions was made, but there is considerable knowledge of three unofficial collections. Most of the constitutions were in Greek, some in both Greek and Latin, but translations of most of them into Latin also appeared. The bulk of the Novels relate to public or ecclesiastical affairs, though private law is by no means absent. Thus, Novels and reform the whole law of intestate succession, and Novel sets out the Christian marriage law. The first thing to notice is that the compilation of Justinian was not conceived of as a unit. It can be no surprise that the first idea was for a collection of imperial rulings. After all, there were precedents
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