Hardly any other work is of such great significance to modern research into Roman law as the Institutiones by the jurist Gaius. This may be due less to the brilliance of the work than to the fact that, following the discovery of a palimpsest in Verona in 1816 by Barthold G. Niebuhr, an almost complete manuscript dating from around 500 AD of the work – which was originally written around 160 AD – was preserved, and the Institutiones therefore represent the only work from the period of classical Roman law that is available to us in almost its entirety. The jurist Gaius was ultimately honoured when Emperor Justinian referred to him in the Constitutio Omnem as ‘Gaius noster’ (case adapted) and modelled the introductory textbook – which he had placed at the beginning of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the Institutiones Iustiniani – on the work from Gaius. However, even before Emperor Justinian published the CIC in 534 AD, the first major codification had already been produced in 509 AD with the Lex Romana Visigothorum of the Visigoth king Alaric II. This codification contains the Epitome Gai (Liber Gai), a summary of the introductory textbook in two books.

In my doctoral thesis, I will examine this Epitome – which is thought to have originated in Gaul in the 5th century AD – and undertake a detailed exegesis. From the perspective of the autonomy of this heteronomous text, I aim to demonstrate in my thesis that the term ‘vulgar law’ – which is clearly intended to be pejorative in its connotation – represents an unscientific and reductive point of view and is a product of 19th- and early 20th-century Roman law scholarship being narrowed on the ‘Classical’ period.