Decisions weren’t published in any systematic method, so any case law that developed was disguised and virtually unrecognised. Each case was to be decided afresh from the laws of the State, which mirrors the unimportance of judges’ choices for future circumstances in civil law methods right now. From 529 to 534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up until that time, so that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of authorized texts from before. Western Europe, meanwhile, relied on a combination of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law till the Justinian Code was…