Jus Gentium

The legal consequence of contact with foreign races is summed up in the phrase Jus Gentium.

The Jus Gentium tended, therefore, to be identified with the Jus Naturale;

The organ by which the jus gentium of the Romans was promulgated, which made it by indirect enactment a portion of Roman Positive law, was principally the Edict of the Praetor.

Jus Gentium was, in fact, the sum of the common ingredients in the customs of the old Italian tribes, for they were all the nations whom the Romans had the means of observing, and who sent successive swarms of immigrants to Roman soil.

After Nature had become a household word in the mouths of the Romans, the belief gradually prevailed among the Roman lawyers that the old Jus Gentium was in fact the lost code of Nature, and that the Prætor in framing an Edictal jurisprudence on the principles of the Jus Gentium was gradually restoring a type from which law had only departed to deteriorate.

The Jus Naturale, or Law of Nature, is simply the Jus Gentium or Law of Nations seen in the light of a peculiar theory.

At an earlier stage of legal opinion the Prætor’s Edict was thought to embody the Jus Gentium, a supposed generalisation of the usages of a great part of mankind.