ABSTRACT
In the later imperial era the old divisions of the law into carefully defined categories faded away along with many of the ancient traditions of Rome. As has already been noted, the distinction between ius civile and ius honorarium disappeared partly as a result of the abandonment of popular legislation and the making of law administratively by the praetors, and partly as a result of the jurists' attitude of treating both bodies of law as belonging to a single category. The body of law that emerged from the combination of these two sources came to be regarded as a single source of law, termed ius or Jurists law'. This was distinguished from the body of rules emanating from imperial legislation, referred to as lex. But as the making of law in the authoritarian and bureaucratic state of this period became more and more strongly centralised, jurisprudence ceased to be the driving force it had been in the past, having been annihilated at its source by the absolutism of the imperial system, and earlier juristic works came to be regarded as a body of finally settled doctrine. At the same time great efforts were made by the emperors to bring some order into the vast and chaotic mass of laws claiming validity in the empire, and these eventually led to the introduction of legal codes in which the various imperial enactments were arranged in an orderly fashion. Moreover, with the obliteration of the distinction between civis and peregrinus following the enactment of the constitutio Antoniniana in the early third century the old distinction between ius civile and ius gentium disappeared: in theory every free man in the empire was now a citizen governed by the same 'Roman law'. In actual fact, however, local systems of law remained in force in the form of custom. Roman law began to infiltrate these systems and, at the same time, to be infiltrated by them and, in the course of time, a system of law emerged which had undergone a process of vulgarisation. Yet the fundamental standards of Roman law continued to determine law making and the administration of justice throughout the later imperial era. The end of this period is marked by the enactment of what was to be the final statement of Roman law, the Corpus luris Civilis of Emperor Justinian.
