The Justinian Code

A thousand years of Roman law had accumulated into a contradictory mass no one could use. Justinian put a commission to work condensing it into a single organized code, throwing out what was obsolete and reconciling what conflicted. The result survived the empire that made it: rediscovered in Italian universities in the 1000s, it became the foundation of the legal systems of most of continental Europe, and through them of Latin America and much of Asia. Ideas about contract, property, and liability now used by billions descend from that editing job.