He served as a justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court for 42 years, from 1922 to 1963, and by himself[1] translated from Latin into English the Codex Justinianus and the Novels (or Novellae Constitutiones), two parts of the Corpus Juris Civilis.
He became especially interested in Roman law and started building an extensive library that eventually would amount to approximately 2,300 volumes.
[5] In 1921, he was appointed to the Wyoming Supreme Court to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Charles E. Blydenburgh, on which he would serve until his retirement in 1963.
Of this discovery he wrote: "So, ruminating on the subject, I wondered if I might not be able to add my little mite to the culture of the world by translating at least one of these Codes.
He noted in his correspondence that he "...devoted to it substantially every evening until eleven o'clock at night or later, and every Saturday afternoon and Sunday with few exceptions.
[10] It apparently was these activities that brought him to the attention of Clyde Pharr, a professor of Greek and Latin at Vanderbilt University.
"[11] In the end, Professor Pharr's ambitious project resulted in only two works: "The Theodosian Code" (1952)[12] and "Ancient Roman Statutes" (1961) [13] In 1938, Blume addressed the Riccobono Seminar on Roman Law, a law society meeting at the Catholic University of America, founded by Salvatore Riccobono[14] on The Code of Justinian, and its Value.
The Theodosian Code translation was published in 1951 by Princeton University Press as first volume in "The Corpus of Roman Law" series; Blume is specially noted by Pharr in preface.
[15] Professor Pharr continued his project at the University of Texas, but he was unable to find the subvention he needed to produce a Codex Justinianus translation based on Blume's.
)[21] A new English translation of the Code, created by a ten-person editorial panel and based on Blume's, was published in October 2016.