Its source was Byzantine law and it was written in Old Church Slavonic in the late ninth or early tenth century.

The oldest (short) version contains thirty chapters primarily of penal law adapted from the Ecloga.

[1] The place of origin of the Zakón Súdnyi Liúdem is a topic of controversy.

On the basis of Frankish and Bavarian legal patterns in the text, the Slovenian legal historian Sergij Vilfan suggested the late 9th century Principality of Lower Pannonia as a likely place of origin, as part of the state-building process initiated by prince Kocel;[3] the plausibility of this thesis has been recently supported by historian Peter Štih.

[4] Its English translators, Dewey and Kleimola, prefer the Moravian theory.