Hadrian enacted, through the jurist Salvius Julianus, the first attempt to codify Roman law. This was the Perpetual Edict, according to which the legal actions of praetors became fixed statutes, and as such could no longer be subjected to personal interpretation or change by any magistrate other than the Emperor. At the same time, following a procedure initiated by Domitian, Hadrian made the Emperor's legal advisory board, the "consilia principis" ("council of the princeps") into a permanent body, staffed by salaried legal aides. Its members were mostly drawn from the equestrian class, replacing the earlier freedmen of the Imperial household. This innovation marked the superseding of surviving Republican institutions by an openly autocratic political system. The reformed bureaucracy was supposed to exercise administrative functions independently of traditional magistracies; objectively it did not detract from the Senate's position. The new civil servants were free men and as such supposed to act on behalf of the interests of the "Crown", not of the Emperor as an individual. However, the Senate never accepted the loss of its prestige caused by the emergence of a new aristocracy alongside it, placing more strain on the already troubled relationship between the Senate and the Emperor.