Codification (law)

Important codifications were developed in the ancient Roman Empire, with the compilations of the Lex Duodecim Tabularum and much later the Corpus Juris Civilis.

The first permanent system of codified laws could be found in imperial China,[note 1] with the compilation of the Tang Code in AD 624.

American legal scholar Noah Feldman has written that the Ottoman codification of the sharia reduced the power of the religious scholarly class, upsetting the balance of powers and the traditional uncodified constitution of Islamic societies and leading to the rise of autocrats unconstrained by rule of law in the Muslim world.

The movement towards codification gained momentum during the Enlightenment, and was implemented in several European countries during the late 18th century (see civil code).

[note 2] The Marine Insurance Act (mildly amended) has been a notable success, adopted verbatim in many common law jurisdictions.

The unofficial "popular edition" of the Constitution is regularly updated to take account of amendments to it, while the official text enrolled in the Supreme Court in 1938 has been replaced five times: in 1942, 1980, 1989, 1999, and 2019.

Since 2006 the Law Reform Commission (LRC) has published semi-official "revised" editions of Acts of the Oireachtas taking account of textual and other amendments to the original version.

[12] In 1810, Sampson published Trial of the Journeymen Cordwainers of the City of New-York for a Conspiracy to Raise Their Wages,[13] commentary on his (unsuccessful) argument in The People v Melvin (1806) to quash an indictment of illegal worker combination.

Insisting on the supremacy of the elected legislature, Sampson's objected that the prosecution was reasoning "abstractedly" from principles of English common law without any reference to statute.

It was this, alone, that allowed them to deny journeymen the right to "conspire against starvation" while, without notice or challenge, leaving master tradesmen in a "permanent conspiracy" to suppress wages.

[17] It was a source of inspiration for Edward Livingston[18] who drew upon French, and other European, civil law in drafting the 1825 Louisiana Code of Procedure.

[20][21] Sampson sought to disassociate codification from the doctrinaire insistence on positive legislation that had marked Jeremy Bentham's championing of the cause in Britain.

But, focussing on the French experience, critics thought it sufficient to comment on the futility of trying to compress human behaviour into rigid categories.

In September 1924, the General Assembly of the League established a committee of experts for the purpose of codification of international law, which was defined by the Assembly as consisting of two aspects: In 1930 the League of Nations held at the Hague a conference for the purpose of codification of rules on general matters, but very little progress was made.

[27] Papal attempts at codification of the scattered mass of canon law spanned the eight centuries since Gratian produced his Decretum c. 1150.

No complete collection of them had ever been published and they remained scattered through the ponderous volumes of the ‘’Bullaria’’ the ‘’Acta Sanctae Sedis’’, and other such compilations, which were accessible to only a few and for professional canonists themselves and formed an unwieldy mass of legal material.

Moreover, not a few ordinances, whether included in the ‘’Corpus Juris’’ or of more recent date, appeared to be contradictory; some had been formally abrogated, others had become obsolete by long disuse; others, again, had ceased to be useful or applicable in the present condition of society.

[29] When the Vatican Council met in 1869 a number of bishops of different countries petitioned for a new compilation of church law that would be clear and easily studied.

In response to the request of the bishops at the First Vatican Council,[30] on 14 May 1904, with the motu proprio Arduum sane munus ("A Truly Arduous Task"), Pope Pius X set up a commission to begin reducing these diverse documents into a single code,[31] presenting the normative portion in the form of systematic short canons shorn of the preliminary considerations[32] ("Whereas...") and omitting those parts that had been superseded by later developments.