Tony Honoré, University of Oxford, Faculty of Law, has posted two SSRN papers on Justinian’s Digest. The first is
Justinian's Digest: The Distribution of Authors and Works to the Three Committees:
This essay addresses a set of related problems about the compilation of Justinian's Digest. Suppose that, as scholars have long believed, Bluhme was right in detecting the existence of three separate masses of works to be read and excerpted by the Digest commissioners and of three separate committees (the Sabinian, the Papinian and the edictal) to read them. How, then, was it decided which works to allot to each mass, and which works should be read together? The allocation was crucial, because Tribonian could not personally supervise the selection of texts made by the committees, at any rate those on which he did not himself serve. How did he ensure that the best texts would be chosen?
The second is
Duplicate Texts and the Compilation of the Digest:
Efforts to investigate the compilation of Justinian's Digest go back in one way or another to Friedrich Bluhme's 1820 article on the regular sequence of inscriptions in the Digest titles, a sequence that is especially visible in D 50.16 and 50.17. This includes the phenomenon of duplicate texts (leges geminae/geminatae), on which Bluhme also compiled, in the same year, a special study. Duplicate texts tell us something about how the Digest commissioners worked, and especially about the different attitudes of the three committees towards excerpting texts for the Digest.
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