Between 529 and 534 the emperor Justinian I commissioned jurists under Tribonian to compile and harmonise centuries of Roman law into a single body, later known as the Corpus Juris Civilis, comprising the Code, the Digest, the Institutes and the Novellae. It distilled classical Roman doctrines of property, contract, servitudes and obligations, including rules on party walls, light, water rights and the use of urban land. Lost to much of the West for centuries, it was rediscovered in eleventh-century Italy and taught in the new universities. From there it shaped the civil-law systems of continental Europe and their colonies.
It transmitted Roman property and neighbour law to later Europe, supplying the legal vocabulary of ownership, easements and expropriation on which modern planning and land regulation still rest.
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