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Roman law in the days of the Roman Republic and Empire was heavily procedural, and lacked a professional legal class. Decisions were not published in any systematic way, so any case law that developed was disguised and almost unrecognised. Each case was to be decided afresh from the laws of the State, which mirrors the unimportance of judges’ decisions for future cases in civil law systems today. From 529 to 534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up until that point, so that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of legal texts from before.

• Under the law, private equity is taxed in exactly the same manner as every other investment.
• A better known tort is defamation, which occurs, for example, when a newspaper makes unsupportable allegations that damage a politician’s reputation.
• In 1972, Baron Hampstead suggested that no such definition