The Corpus Iuris Civilis, a distillation of the entire body of Roman law, was directed by the Emperor Justinian and published in a.d. 533. The Institutes, the briefest of the four works that make up the Corpus, is considered to be the cradle of Roman law and remains the best and clearest introduction to the subject. A Companion to Justinian's "Institutes" will assist the modern-day reader of the Institutes, and is specifically intended to accompany the translation by Peter Birks and Grant McLeod, published by Cornell in 1987. The book offers an intelligent and lucid guide to the legal concepts in the Institutes. The essays follow its structure and take up its principal subjects--for example, slavery, marriage, property, and capital and noncapital crimes--and give a thorough account of the law relating to each of them. Throughout, the authors explain technical Latin vocabulary and legal terms.

The Institutes are a complete exposition of the elements of Roman law and are divided into four books—the first treating of persons and the differences of the status they may occupy in the eye of the law; the second-of things, and the modes in which rights over them may be acquired, including the law relating to wills; the third of intestate succession and of obligations; the fourth of actions and their forms. For many centuries they had been the familiar textbook of all students of Roman law.

The gospels and ancient historians agree: Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman imperial prefect in Jerusalem. To this day, Christians of all churches confess that Jesus died 'under Pontius Pilate'. But what exactly does that mean? Within decades of Jesus' death, Christians began suggesting that it was the Judaean authorities who had crucified Jesus--a notion later echoed in the Qur'an. In the third century, one philosopher raised the notion that, although Pilate had condemned Jesus, he'd done so justly; this idea survives in one of the main strands of modern New Testament criticism. So what is the truth of the matter? And what is the history of that truth? David Lloyd Dusenbury reveals Pilate's 'innocence' as not only a neglected theological question, but a recurring theme in the history of European political thought. He argues that Jesus' interrogation by Pilate, and Augustine of Hippo's North African sermon on that trial, led to the concept of secularity and the logic of tolerance emerging in early modern Europe. Without the Roman trial of Jesus, and the arguments over Pilate's innocence, the history of empire--from the first century to the twenty-first--would have been radically different.