INTRODUCTION TO BOOK III.

In this book the treatment of universal succession is continued, the first subject considered being the mode in which a person's universitas iuris devolves on his dying intestate. This falls naturally into two divisions, according as the deceased was free-born or libertus. Of the devolution of a free-born man's universitas we have a full historical account. The first two Titles in the main describe the classes of persons who succeeded an intestate under the law of the Twelve Tables: in the first rank being the sui heredes to the exclusion of all other descendants; in the second the nearest agnate or agnates, in preference to ascendants and all other collateral relatives whatsoever. No portion of the Institutes presents so clearly the contrast between modern and ancient law, or brings out more vividly the exclusive regard paid to agnatic relationship in primitive society. While pointing out the injustice which this system of succession entailed upon many classes, especially emancipated children and descendants or collaterals who traced their kinship with the deceased through a female, Justinian takes occasion to describe briefly the extent to which a remedy had been supplied by the bonorum possessio intestati of the Praetor, a subject more explicitly treated in Title 9, and also various disconnected changes made in the law by earlier Emperors as well as by himself. To the most sweeping of the Praetor's innovations, namely that by which he granted rights of succession upon intestacy to persons related to the deceased by cognation alone, though only in subordination to the classes recognised by the Twelve Tables, the fifth Title is exclusively devoted; that which follows details the mode in which the degrees of this natural relationship are calculated. The third and fourth Titles deal with two enactments of the civil law passed in the latter half of the second century, the SCa. Tertullianum and Orfitianum, which redressed a wrong arising from the Twelve Tables for which no adequate remedy had been provided by the praetorian bonorum possessio. The first of these preferred the mother to many of the agnates of her deceased children the second raised a woman's children from the rank of

mere cognates, in relation to her, to that of sui heredes, thus giving them a statutory right of succeeding her to the exclusion of her agnates.

The intestate succession to freedmen is dealt with in Title 7, the earlier paragraphs of which give a historical summary of the old rules in cases of both testacy and intestacy, and of the changes introduced in the interest of the patron by the Praetor and the lex Papia Poppaea. Between this, and a brief account of the curiously contrasted mode of succession to Latini Iuniani, a class of freedmen which as we know was abolished by Justinian, is a statement of his own settlement of the classes entitled to succeed upon the intestacy of a civis libertus, and of the latter's testamentary rights against the patron. The modification which might conceivably be effected in these rules by the exercise of a power, conferred by a senatusconsult, of assigning any particular freedman to any particular child in one's power is considered in Title 8.

The Roman law of intestate succession, especially to ingenui, is an admirable illustration of the heterogeneous mass of rules which may grow round any subject usually regulated by law where there is a variety of legislative organs, often actuated by diverse motives, and little anxiety in the supreme legislature or in the lawyer class to reduce them to formal order and unity by some process of codification. Technically, of course, the rules which, at the date of the publication of the Institutes, decided on whom an intestate person's universitas iuris should devolve, were enacted by Justinian himself; historically, they originated either in the Twelve Tables, or in the Edict relating to bonorum possessio, or in the later civil law, which, either through senatusconsulta or imperial constitutions, conferred at long intervals of legislation, and in an entirely disconnected manner, rights of succession upon relatives of the deceased whom the earlier law had altogether passed over. The main drift of this series of changes was the same throughout; to fill up the voids and correct the anomalies of the Twelve Tables; to substitute cognation for agnation as the sole title a person could have to succeed. No department of law called more imperatively for a comprehensive simplification, such, for instance, as that which we have seen Justinian effected in the law of Usucapion and Prescription; but the changes made in the Corpus Iuris are hesitating and tentative, the most considerable perhaps being that in the classes of bonorum possessores, necessitated by Justinian's reform in the succession to liberti, of which a full account is given in Title 9.

When the Institutes were published, the three distinct bodies of rules relating to one subject still coexisted side by side: the successor of an intestate might base his claim on the Twelve Tables, on the Edict, or on some enactment of the later civil law; in the second case, it is true, he was not technically heres, but, as we have already seen, his rights were substantially identical with those of a civil law successor. Cases were even still to be found, in which agnatic relationship entitled a claimant to priority over others who, if cognation alone were considered, would at least take with him pari passu. It was not unnatural that Justinian should be dissatisfied with his work, and by a Novel issued in the year A. D. 543 he substituted for the system of succession which has here been sketched a new scheme based entirely upon blood relationship, of which an account is given in the notes to Title 9. 9.

Two other modes quibus res per universitatem adquiruntur,' though of far less interest and importance than inheritance, are described in Titles 10 and II. The first of these is the type of adoption known as adrogation. When a person sui iuris gave himself in adoption to another, his universitas iuris passed, under the law as previously settled, to the latter; but the development of the filiusfamilias' proprietary capacity had infringed upon the necessity of this rule, and Justinian, as he himself remarks, limited the adrogator's right in accordance with the principle which he had already established in the second book. The liability of the adrogator for debts contracted by the adopted son while sui iuris is treated in the last paragraph of the Title. The last remaining form of universal succession, which was introduced by a constitution of Marcus Aurelius, was a provision 'favore libertatis,' to secure the freedom of slaves who had been manumitted in a will under which no heres accepted, and enabled any one who would give the creditors full security for the satisfaction of their claims to have the estate adjudged to him, thus putting it in his power, as quasi heir, to fulfil the intentions of the deceased.

Title 12 briefly touches on two universal successions obsolete under Justinian's legislation; the one the peculiar form of bankruptcy execution known as bonorum emptio-a subject which is more fully discussed in a note on the text; the other introduced by the SC. Claudianum, of which we have already read, and which, with its consequences, was repealed by Justinian in person.

From this subject we pass at Title 13 to the consideration of the important class of res incorporales called obligations. An obligation

is a legal relation between two ascertained persons, in virtue of which the one is entitled to claim an act or forbearance from the other. The one, or creditor, has a right in personam, the other, or debtor, owes to him a relative duty; both right and duty are conceived as obligationes, or as correlative parts of a single obligatio; but it is the right, or creditor side, alone which is a res incorporalis, and owing to which this department of law falls under the head of 'res' at all.

This is not so clear and above doubt as never to have been questioned. The position of obligations between the law of Inheritance and the law of Actions has led Hugo and others to regard them as a portion of the latter rather than of the ius quod ad res pertinet; a theory to some extent countenanced by the fact that in the Digest (de obligationibus et actionibus, 44. 7) and Code (4. 10) actions and obligations are treated together, and by the technical meaning of 'actio' as action in personam, in contrast with 'petitio' or action in rem, Dig. 44. 7. 28; 50. 16. 178. 2. It has even been attempted to support this view by a statement of Theophilus in his commentary on Tit. 13. pr. of this book, where he says, 'Now that we have spoken of persons and of things, we ought logically to treat of actions; but this arrangement, i.e. the treating of obligations first, is not inexcusable, for in discussing obligations one is implicitly discussing actions also, of which they are the mothers.' But it is clear from his remarks on Bk. iv. 6. pr., that Theophilus is preferring a fourfold division of the law, making obligationes a fourth and independent department intermediate between res and actiones; and this cannot convince us that Justinian in his Institutes intended to depart from the arrangement of Gaius: for although, had we the Institutes alone, a reasonable suspicion might be justified by the fact that obligations are partly treated in the third book, which no one doubts begins with res, and partly in the fourth, which no one doubts ends with actiones, yet this is removed by our knowledge that Gaius concludes the subject of obligations in his third book, and devotes the whole of the fourth to actions. Indeed, the enumeration of obligations among res incorporales in Bk. ii. 2. 2, is sufficient proof in itself of the wrongness of Hugo's theory.

The acts or events which give rise to this kind of legal relation called obligatio are of course different from one another in character, but they may be grouped with tolerable correctness in two principal and two subordinate classes. One of the former, which is prominent in all developed systems of law, is agreement; the other is delict, which may here be defined with sufficient accuracy as wrong other

than breach of contract. But there are obligations which take their rise in circumstances in which the person held liable has neither entered into an agreement with the other party to the relation, nor committed a delict against him, in the technical Roman sense of the word. In these circumstances, however, it is always possible to find more or less of analogy with one or other of the main sources of obligations so that obligations are said in Tit. 13. 2 always to arise from contract or quasi ex contractu, or from delict or quasi ex delicto.

Not all agreements are contracts; in other words, it does not follow that because a person has given a promise he can be compelled to keep it by action at law. Primitive law, it would seem, at first enforces promises only when they are accompanied by some striking and solemn formality: formal contracts are actionable before those which are formless. There were three kinds of form known to the Roman system in which a promise might be clothed so as to be enforceable at law, two of which, nexum and expensilatio or litterae, were obsolete long before Justinian, though there is some notice of the second, and a lame attempt to represent it as still existing, in Title 21. The third was stipulatio, the expression of the agreement in a solemn question and answer, which, however, by a gradual process of change had in Justinian's own age been so stripped of its original characteristics, that it is only by an abuse of language that it can be described as a formal contract at all. But quite early in the history of the Roman Law this requirement of form, coupled with the inability of aliens to employ it, was found so to hamper the freedom of commercial intercourse, and to interfere so largely with the transactions of everyday life, that certain contracts of the ius gentium were added to the small circle already recognised: two kinds of loan, deposit, and pledge were held to be actionable merely in virtue of delivery by one party to the other, whence the obligation was said to be imposed 're,' while sale, hire, partnership, and agency could now be contracted by the mere consent of the parties without the necessity of any formality, and consequently were called 'consensual' contracts. All of these subjects are treated at considerable length in this part of the Institutes. The contracts which are called Real-mutuum, or loan for consumption, commodatum, or loan for use, deposit, and pledge because the 'causa' through which they become actionable is 'res' or delivery, are discussed in Title 14. Stipulation receives a consideration commensurate with the importance of the part it played in so large a proportion of the daily dealings between man