of Justinian mention Custom or Usage, the source of consuetudinary or customary law (jus non scriptum, consensu receptum, moribus introductum). To this branch of law are referred, with other rules, the invalidity of donations between husband and wife, Dig. 24, 1, 1, the power of making a will for an infant successor who dies before the age of puberty (pupillaris substitutio), Dig. 28, 6, 2, and universal succession in Coemption and Adrogation, 3 § 82. We may suppose that Customary law, like Roman law in general, would fall into two divisions, Civil law and Gentile law, the former embracing what Roman writers sometimes speak of as mores majorum. Before the time of Gaius, however, most, if not all, of Customary law must have been taken up into the edict of the praetor or the writings of the jurists, Cic. De Invent. 2, 22; i.e. unwritten law must have changed its character and have been transformed into written law.

DE IURIS DIVISIONE.

§ 8. Omne autem ius quo utimur vel ad personas pertinet, vel ad res, vel ad actiones. sed prius videamus de personis.

ON THE BRANCHES OF THE LAW.

§ 8. The whole of the law by which we are governed relates either to persons, or to things, or to procedure; and let us first examine the law of persons.

§ 8. What are the leading divisions of law-what are the main masses into which legislation naturally breaks itself-what are the joints and articulations which separate the whole code into various subordinate codes, like the different limbs and members of an organic whole-what is the import of the Gaian division into jus personarum, jus rerum, jus actionum, or rather, to adhere to the classical phrases, jus ad personas pertinens, jus ad res pertinens, jus ad actiones pertinens?

By jus ad actiones pertinens, to begin with the easier part of the problem, there is no doubt that the inventor of the division intended to designate the law of PROCEDURE as opposed to the law of rights; the adjective code, to use Bentham's phraseology, as opposed to the substantive code. There is as little doubt that in the Institutions of Gaius this design is not executed with precision, and that, instead of the law of procedure, the last portion of his treatise rather contains the law of sanctioning rights, as opposed to the law of primary rights. Or perhaps we should say that the legislative

provisions respecting Procedure have a double aspect a purely formal aspect, so far as they give regularity and method to the enforcement of sanctioning rights; and a material aspect, so far as certain stages of procedure (e. g. litis contestatio and res judicata) operate like Dispositions or any other Titles to modify the substantive rights of the contending parties. Procedure, then, is treated of in these Institutions partly indeed in its formal character, but still more in its material character, i. e. so far as its incidents can be regarded as belonging to the substantive code.

It is more difficult to determine the principle of the other division, the relation of the law of Persons to the law of Things. They both deal with the rights and duties of persons in the ordinary modern acceptation of the word; why then, we may inquire, are certain rights and duties of persons separated from the rest and dealt with under the distinguishing category of jura personarum? It is not enough to say with Austin that the law of Things is the universal or general portion of the law, the law of Persons a particular and exceptional branch; that it is treated separately on account of no essential or characteristic difference, but merely because it is commodious to treat separately what is special and exceptional from what is general and universal. This answer furnishes no positive character of the law of Persons, but only the negative character of anomaly, i. e. of unlikeness to the larger portion of the law; but it would be difficult to show that the law of Persons is more exceptional, anomalous, eccentric, than the Civil dispositions as opposed to the Natural or Gentile dispositions of the law of Things.

We must look to the details of the law of Persons, and observe whether its dispositions have any common character as contrasted with the dispositions of the law of Things. The law of Persons, in other words, the law of Status, classifies men as slaves and free, as citizens (privileged) and aliens (unprivileged), as paterfamilias (superior) and filiusfamilias (dependent). The law of Things looks at men as playing the parts of contractors or of neighbouring proprietors; in other words, the law of Persons considers men as UNEQUALS, the law of Things considers them as EQUALS: the one may be defined as the law of relations of inequality, the other as the law of relations of equality.

It may induce us to believe that the law of unequal relations and the law of equal relations is a fundamental division of the general code, if we consider how essential are the ideas of equality

and inequality to the fundamental conception of law. If we ventured on a Platonic myth, we might say that Zeus, wishing to confer the greatest possible gift on the human race, took the most opposite and uncombinable things in the universe, Equality and Inequality, and, welding them together indissolubly, called the product by the name of political society or positive law.

The assumption will hardly be controverted, that in the relations of subject to subject, Positive law, like Ethical law, recognizes, as an ideal at least, the identity of the just (lawful) with the equal. Inequality, however, is no less essentially involved in positive law. We have seen that there is no right and no duty by positive law without a legislator and sovereign to whom the person owing the duty is in subjection. On the one side weakness, on the other irresistible power. Positive rights and duties, then, imply both the relation of subject to subject, and the relation of subject to sovereign or wielder of the sanction, in other words, both the relation of equal to equal, and the relation of unequal to unequal. It is the more surprising that Austin should apparently have failed to seize with precision this conception of the law of Persons, as he makes the remark, in which the whole truth seems implicitly contained, that the bulk of the law of Persons composes the Public, Political, or Constitutional code (jus publicum). Political society or government essentially implies subordination. It implies, on the one hand, sovereign power reposing in various legislative bodies, distributed, delegated, and vested in various corporations, magistrates, judges, and other functionaries; on the other hand, private persons or subjects subordinate to the sovereign power and to its delegates and ministers. The different forms of government are so many forms of subordination, so many relations of superior and inferior, that is, so many relations of unequals. Public law, then, is a law of Status, and the law of Persons or law of Status in the private code is the intrusion of a portion of the public code into the private code; or, in barbarous and semi-civilized legislations, the disfigurement of private law by the introduction of relations that properly belong to public law. For instance, the most salient institution of the ancient Roman law of Persons, the power of life and death over wife and child that vested in the father of the household, was the concession to a subject of an attribute that properly belongs to the sovereign or a public functionary. Another institution, slavery, placed one subject over another in

These, however, are not the special and exceptional rights of certain eminently privileged classes, but the ordinary rights of all the community, at least of all who live under the protection of the law; they belong to filiusfamilias as well as to paterfamilias, to peregrinus and latinus as well as to civis. The rights in question, that is to say, do not belong to the law of unequal rights, or the law of Persons, but to the law of equal rights, or the law of Things.

The anomalous institution of slavery, however, furnishes a ground for controverting this arrangement; for, as by this legalized iniquity of ancient law, the slave, living as he did, not so much under the protection as under the oppression of the law, was denuded of all the rights of humanity, including those of which we speak, we cannot say that these rights belong to servus as well as to liber. The same, however, may be said of contract rights and rights of ownership, for the slave had neither part nor lot in these any more than in the right of a man to the use of his own limbs. In defining, therefore, jura rerum to be the equal rights of all, we must be understood to mean, of all who have any rights. Perhaps, indeed, instead of saying that jura rerum are the rights of men regarded as equal, it would be more exact to say, that while jus personarum regards exclusively the unequal capacities, that is, the unequal rights of persons, jus rerum treats of rights irrespectively both of the equality and the inequality of the persons in whom they are vested, leaving their equal or unequal distribution to be determined by jus personarum.

In order to mark the natural position of these rights in the civil code, I have avoided designating them, with Blackstone, by the name of Personal rights, a term which I am precluded from using by yet another reason. I have employed the terms Personal right and Real right to mark the antithesis of rights against a single debtor and rights against the universe. Now the rights in question are rights that imply a negative obligation incumbent on all the world, that is to say, in our sense of the words they are not Personal, but Real.

As contrasted with Acquired rights (Erworbene rechte, jus quaesitum) they are called Birthrights or PRIMORDIAL rights (Urrechte), names which are open to objection, as they may seem to imply a superior dignity of these rights, or an independence, in contrast with other rights, of positive legislation, characters which

the name is not intended to connote. For purposes of classification this branch of primary rights is of minor importance. Unlike Status, Dominion, Obligation, Primordial rights are not the ground of any primary division of the code. The actions founded on the infraction of Primordial rights partly belong to the civil code of obligation arising from Tort (e. g. actio injuriarum), partly and principally to the criminal code.

DE CONDICIONE HOMINUM.

§ 9. Et quidem summa divisio de iure personarum haec est, quod omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi.

§ 10. Rursus liberorum hominum alii ingenui sunt, alii libertini.

§ 11. Ingenui sunt, qui liberi nati sunt; libertini, qui ex iusta servitute manumissi sunt.

§ 12. Rursus libertinorum tria sunt genera: nam aut cives Romani, aut Latini, aut dediticiorum numero sunt. de quibus singulis dispiciamus; ac prius de dediticiis.

ON DIVERSITIES OF CONDITION.

§ 9. The first division of men by the law of persons is into freemen and slaves.

§ 10. Freemen are divided into freeborn and freedmen.

§ 11. The freeborn are free by birth; freedmen by manumission from legal slavery.

§ 12. Freedmen, again, are divided into three classes, citizens of Rome, Latins, and persons on the footing of enemies surrendered at discretion. Let us examine each class in order, and commence with freedmen assimilated to enemies surrendered at discretion.

§ 12. As Gaius has not marked very strongly the divisions of the present book, it may be worth while to consider what are the leading branches of the doctrine of Status. Status falls under three heads,-liberty (libertas), citizenship (civitas), and domestic position (familia).

Under the first head, men are divided into free (liberi) and slaves (servi): the free, again, are either free by birth (ingenui) or by manumission (libertini). We have here, then, three classes to consider ingenui, libertini, servi.

Under the second head men were originally divided into citizens (cives) and aliens (peregrini). The rights of citizens fall into two branches, political and civil, the former being electoral and legislative power (jus suffragii) and capacity for office (jus honorum), the latter relating to property (commercium) or to marriage (connubium). Aliens were of course devoid of the political portion of these rights (suffragium and honores); they were also devoid of