Even university law teaching in Europe often involved interchange between practitioner and teacher, exemplified in such great figures as the French 18th-century teacher, advocate, and judge Robert Joseph Pothier, whose commentaries provided the foundation for the Napoleonic Code of civil law.
Thanks to the field of archeology, it has been found that today's Torah portion, Parashat Mishpatim, with its code of civil law, bears strong parallels with many law codes of the ancient Near East.
Giving expression to those beliefs and to the needs of the revolutionary government, the National Assembly adopted a unanimous resolution on September 4, 1791, providing that "there shall be a code of civil laws common for the entire realm".
So when strong rulers started to build states, they had to take account of the emerging codes of civil law.
Throughout the Middle Ages the Code of Justinian, or Corpus Juris Civilis ("Body of Civil Law"), the four-volume codification of Roman law compiled under the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (483 565), was regarded as the quintessence of human law, applicable in virtually every situation.
Called the Codex Constitutionum and partly founded upon the 5th-century Theodosian Code, it comprised the first of four works compiled between 529 and 565 called the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), commonly known as the Code of Justinian.
He and his colleagues used the Corpus juris civilis ("Body of Civil Law"; also known as the Code of Justinian) of the 6th-century Byzantine emperor Justinian I and the work of the glossators thereon, together with Roman civil law, as a foundation from which to derive broad legal principles that could be used to solve contemporary problems in 14th-century Europe.
While self-contained, it evidently does not represent the entirety of laws; curiously, it stresses those areas of civil law (inheritance, adoption) that are notably lacking in the Hittite Law Code.
Napoleon's set of civil laws, the Code Civil now often known as the Napoleonic Code was prepared by committees of legal experts under the supervision of Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, the Second Consul.
The kings of Ayutthaya also issued formal codes of civil and criminal law based on the ancient Indian body of jurisprudence called the Dharma-shastra.
