+86. Roman law.+ In the Roman law everything proceeds from the emperor. He is the possessor of all authority, the fountain of honor, the author of all legislation, and the referee in all disputes. Lawyers trained by the study of this code learned to conceive of all the functions of the state as acts, powers, and rights of a monarchical sovereign. They stood beside the kings and princes of the later Middle Ages ready to construe the institutions of suzerainty into this monarchical form. They broke down feudalism and helped to build the absolutist dynastic state, wherever the Roman law was in force, and wherever it had greatly influenced the legal system. The church also had great interest to employ the Roman law, because it included the ecclesiastical legislation of the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries, and because the canon law was imitated from it in spirit and form. In all matters of private rights the provisions of the Justinian code were good and beneficial, so that those provisions won their own way by their own merit.[98] In the _Sachsenspiegel_ there was no distinction of property between man and wife, but this meant that all which both had was a joint capital for use in their domestic economy. When the marriage was dissolved the property returned to the side from which it came. Later, in many districts, this arrangement developed into a real community of goods under various forms. "It was in regard to these adjustments of property rights that the jurists of the Middle Ages did most harm by introducing the Roman law, for it was especially in regard to this matter that the Roman law stood in strongest contrast to the German notions, and the resistance of the German people is to be seen in the numerous local systems of law, which remained in use in most of Germany; unfortunately not everywhere, nor uniformly."[99]