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Updated: June 9, 2025
Acquisition of territory has always been the great spur of national ambition, and the rules which govern this acquisition, together with the rules which moderate the wars in which it too frequently results, are merely transcribed from the part of the Roman law which treats of the modes of acquiring property jure gentium.
The supposed want of general elementary principles in the work of Grotius gave occasion to Puffendorf's treatise de Jure Naturae et Gentium; afterwards abridged by him into the small octavo volume De Officio hominis et civis: an edition of it in octavo was published by Professor Garschen Carmichael, of Glasgow, in 1724.
But the judgment of his contemporaries as to his proud pre-eminence is not likely ever to be called in question. He is enrolled among Dii majorum gentium, and there he will remain to the end of the ages. When he was laid beside the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey, there arose far and wide a lamentation as of personal bereavement.
And the law of nature is also, by the heathen writers, often called jus gentium, as Rosinus noteth.
This is shown in his treatment of the civil as much as the moral law. The great system of jurisprudence in his day, with which every code claiming to have universal value had necessarily to challenge comparison, was Roman Law. That part of it which was applied throughout the Empire, the jus gentium, was regarded as "written reason."
Hitherto it had been assumed that behind all national disputes lay a ius gentium by which all were bound, and that behind all religious questions lay the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, from which there was no appeal. The modern period which certainly does not represent the last word of civilisation, has witnessed the abandonment of these ideas. The change took place gradually.
The neglect of demarcations and boundaries seems to me, therefore, the feature of the Jus Gentium which was depicted in Æquitas. I imagine that the word was at first a mere description of that constant levelling or removal of irregularities which went on wherever the prætorian system was applied to the cases of foreign litigants.
Over so much of Europe as was comprised in the Romano-German empire, the connection of the confederate states was regulated by the complex and as yet incomplete mechanism of the Imperial constitution; and, surprising as it may seem to us, it was a favourite notion of German lawyers that the relations of commonwealths, whether inside or outside the empire, ought to be regulated not by the Jus Gentium, but by the pure Roman jurisprudence, of which Cæsar was still the centre.
Biel, whose opinion is always very valuable as being that of the last of a long line, says that there are three kinds of slaves slaves of God, of sin, and of man. The first kind of slavery is wholly good, the second wholly bad, while the third, though not instituted by, is approved by the jus gentium.
The difference between them was entirely historical, and no distinction in essence could ever be established between them. It is almost unnecessary to add that the confusion between Jus Gentium, or Law common to all Nations, and international law is entirely modern. The classical expression for international law is Jus Feciale or the law of negotiation and diplomacy.
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