We explain to you what was the origin of Law, its relationship with authority and the first laws. Also, Roman law.
The Emperor Justinian compiled Roman law in the 6th century AD. C.What is the origin of law?
The right Is the set of rules and principles with which a society Determined human chooses to rule herself, in order to distinguish between the just and the unjust, order and chaos, the partial and the impartial. Like many other human inventions, it had a starting place in our history as a civilization and as a species.
The origin of law, thus, necessarily goes back to the first attempts to lead the agricultural societies of the humanity ancient towards a common goal, guaranteeing social peace and some kind of productive order. In this way, the law would have arisen from the hand of the first primitive forms of Condition.
At the time when it became essential to delegate to certain authorities (chiefs, kings, shamans, priests) the canIt was also necessary to determine what would be the rules of succession of said power, what would be its scope, its forms, its methods. In this way, a habit, a way of doing things, which was fundamental for the birth of law.
The first norms and laws were exercised and preserved orally, and were only brief formulas that governed the exchange, or that resolved possible disputes around the property wave violence. But as society became more complex, the laws also became more complex, and thus arose the need to have them in writing to preserve them, or being too complicated to memorize them.
The first texts of this nature, written on clay tablets and from Mesopotamian antiquity, were:
- The Urukgina code (c. 2380 BC) that ruled in ancient town Sumerian from Uruk.
- The Ur-Nammu code (c. 2050 BC), decreed by the king of the city-state of Ur.
- The famous code of Hammurabi (circa 1790 BC), dictated by the ancient Babylonian King, which established the measures to be taken as punishment for violations, deaths or unfair attitudes.
Also in ancient China various bodies of laws were formulated, from at least the 5th century BC. However, the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) was the first to collect them and formulate them in a single document, of a political, military, economic, cultural and ideological nature.
Thus was born the Qin code and served as the support of the Qin law, applied to the unified Chinese Empire, and inherited by later dynasties, such as the Han, who proceeded to merge it with the principles of Confusianism.
To these examples we could add many others from ancient Egypt, or from ancient Jewish peoples (still present in the Bible today), or the Phoenician commercial codes.
But in the West it was the roman law the one that really made the difference. Typical of the ancient Roman Republic, it had the complexity and quality necessary to operate for almost a thousand consecutive years, from its first documents such as the Law of the XII Tables, to the legal compilation carried out by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD. . C. (the Corpus Juris Civilis).
Roman law already distinguished between public Law Y private right. Thus, it regulated matters related to the State and also those of private life.
Considered as sources not just customcustomary, in Latin), but also the decisions of the Roman Senate, the pronouncements of the Roman magistrates, the plebiscites and also the opinions of the jurisconsults (the iura). Later, when the Republic became an Empire (in 27 BC), the "imperial constitutions" were also taken into account, issued by the emperor himself.
Its importance was such in the West and the world, that much of the current system of many nations comes from Roman law. The very word "right" comes from the Latin word directus, translatable as "straight" or "direct", in the sense of "that which does not deviate to one side or the other".
Most of the European legal codes come from Roman law, and thus also those that, centuries later, through the Imperialism and the Colonialism the powers Europeans spread throughout the world.