Abstract

This chapter elaborates two influential early sources of juridical natural law: the Justinian Code and Gratian’s Decretum. The former went on to exert a major influence on Continental legal systems and the latter on Church canon law. It describes how each utilized natural law and ius gentium and discusses how they treated slavery and torture. Roman jurists invoked natural law in ad hoc ways largely based on shared cultural views, assumptions about nature, and what they thought was obvious or reasonable, and they viewed natural law as inferior to civil law.