Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles - The Ludwig von Mises ...

The Legal Nature of the Monetary Irregular-Deposit Contract 27directed at students and based on Gaius’s Institutiones. TheDigest or Pandecta is a compilation of classical legal texts whichincludes over nine thousand excerpts from the works of differentprestigious jurists. Passages taken from the works ofUlpian, which comprise a third of the Digest, together withexcerpts from Paul, Papinian, and Julianus, fill more of the bookthan the writings of all of the rest of the jurists as a group. In all,contributions appear from thirty-nine specialists in Roman classicallaw. The Codex Constitutionum consists of a chronologically-orderedcollection of imperial laws and constitutions (theequivalent of the present-day concept of legislation), and Novellae,the last work in the Corpus, contains the last imperial constitutionssubsequent to the Codex Constitutionum. 32Now let us follow up this brief introduction by turning tothe Roman classical jurists and their treatment of the institutionof monetary irregular deposit. It is clear they understoodit, considered it a special type of deposit possessing the essentialdeposit characteristics and differentiated it from othercontracts of a radically different nature and essence, such asthe mutuum contract or loan.THE IRREGULAR DEPOSIT CONTRACT UNDER ROMAN LAWThe deposit contract in general is covered in section 3 ofbook 16 of the Digest, entitled “On Depositing and Withdrawing”(Depositi vel contra). Ulpian begins with the following definition:A deposit is something given another for safekeeping. It is socalled because a good is posited [or placed]. The preposition de32 Justinian stipulated that the necessary changes be made in the compiledmaterials so that the law would be appropriate to the historicalcircumstances and as close to perfect as possible. These modifications,corrections and omissions are called interpolations and also emblemataTriboniani, after Tribonian, who was in charge of the compilation. Thereis an entire discipline dedicated to the study of these interpolations, todetermining their content through comparison, logical analysis, thestudy of anachronisms in language, etc., since it has been discoveredthat a substantial number of them were made after the Justinian era. SeeHernández-Tejero Jorge, Lecciones de derecho romano, pp. 50–51.