Papirius Iustus: Libri XX de constitutionibus

This volume investigates Papirius Iustus, a jurist figure who until now has remained substantially in the shadows of Romanist studies due to the extreme lacunosity of the available information, in order to restore the extraordinary novelty of his work, Libri XX de Constitutionibus, perhaps the only one written by him or the only one known today thanks to the 18 fragments of the Digesta of Justinian. Active during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, Papirius Iustus was a high imperial official capable of grasping at an early stage the profound change taking place in the empire in the second century AD, a change that from Hadrian onwards progressively centralized the political center of gravity on the princeps with the consequent effects of the disruptive force of his normative will on the system of sources of production of law. The Libri XX de Constitutionibus are clearly distinguished in the editorial panorama of the jurisprudential scientific literature for their anomalous character of collection of imperial constitutions without any commentary, so much so that they can rightly be considered forerunners of the collections of imperial normative material, which resulted in the late antique codifications as the final outcome of an irreversible transition from jurisprudential law to authoritative law.