Justinian

Of course even the nineteenth-century conservation and public health movements had ancient sources. Around 530 ad, the Roman emperor Justinian codified the legal basis for natural resource protection - the idea that air, water, oceans, wildlife, and more are owned by all of us together and none of us individually, and that the sovereign has a duty to protect and conserve these resources for present and future generations. The code of Justinian eventually led to the modern public trust doctrine of environmental management and protection, described below. 

The Christian Emperor Justinian closed down Athens Platonic Academy in 529CE. The philosophers Damascius and Simplicius relocated close to Harran. Simplicius was a follower of Xenophanes Eleatic School. These philosophers would have greatly enriched society... 

The discovery of a manuscript of the code of Justinian occasioned the rebirth of the study of jurisprudence and of legislation and served to mitigate the severity of the law, even amongst the people who knew how to turn it to their advant e without wishing to be restricted by it. 

In the east Emperor Justinian in the 500s strove to protect what was left of the old Roman Empire by throwing up intellectual walls. 

When I turned my attention to investigating the Byzantine child care system, I expected to find the same sort of institutional centralization around orphanotropheia, located in the empire s larger cities. Indeed, the emperor Justinian, the great legal reformer of the sixth century, placed orphanotropheia in the same legal category of pious... 

In examining the issue of mothers and their role as legal guardians, I shall naturally include specific cases of children who had lost only their fathers and therefore fell under the protection of their mothers. This study as a whole, however, will focus on what the Byzantines from the time of the emperor Justinian (527-565) judged to be true orphans, that is, children who had lost both parents. 

As we saw in Chapter Two, Classical Roman law recognized three types of guardians those who were appointed by testament (tutela tes-tamentaria), those who assumed the tutela based on their family relationship to the orphan (tutela legitima), and those who were appointed by magistrates (tutela Atiliana also known as tutela dativa). Byzantine law retained these distinctions in practice to the end of the empire, with the exception of the period of Iconoclastic law (741 867). In fact, Justinian s Institutes (circa 533) preserved the clearest description of the three types of guardianship to survive from Classical, Postclassical, or Byzantine times. ... 

In the sixth century, the emperor Justinian introduced a major innovation in magisterial appointments of some guardians in the provinces. In those cases where the orphan children inherited estates valued at less than 500 solidi, the defensor of the local city together with the bishop or other municipal officials was to establish guardians. If the bishop took part, the records of appointment, which included an inventory of the property, were to be filed in the church archives. At Constantinople, Justinian entrusted these smaller cases to the praetor tutelarius, whose role in guardianship cases had previously been eclipsed by the expanding power of the urban prefect. ... 

Just as Byzantine law preserved the Classical Roman definition of guardianship and most of its system of tutda classifications, so too it accepted the age limits assigned by the Classical jurists to the two stages of guardianship, tutda and cura. Justinian s Institutes clearly restated the Roman ages for the sixth-century Byzantine Empire. Tutors supervised boys until they reached the age of fourteen, girls until they reached the age of twelve. Thereafter, curators oversaw youths of both sexes until their wards turned twenty-five. ... 

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