JUDGE-MADE LAW their responsa pntdcntimn, the technical name given to their opinions as experts, which were promptly recorded on tablets by their students or disciples. As the jurisconsults thus became the reservoir from which was drawn that body of prin ciples heretofore described as equity, it is all-important to ascertain the source from which they themselves derived such prin ciples. According to the institutional treat ise published under the authority of Jus tinian, "The law which a people enacts is called the civil law of that people, but that which natural reason appoints for all man kind is called the law of nations, because all nations use it." What was the origin and nature of this Roman jus gentttm, this law used by all nations, a law utterly dif ferent, of course, from what is now called international law, the body of rules regu lating the intercourse of states as corporate persons. It was the general rule of the an cient world that the law of one city had no application to the citizens of another. The jus civile of Rome, the exclusive property of her citizens, was the special law admin istered by the prastor urbanus between Roman and Roman; it could not be applied between a Roman and a foreigner. For that reason, as there was a large body of resident foreigners at Rome who would have been entirely without the benefits of law if they had been forced to rely upon the praetor urbanus, it was necessary to consti tute a praetor peregrinus (247 B.C.), the praetor of foreigners, whose duty it was to administer justice between Roman citizens and foreigners, between foreigner and for eigner, and between citizens of different cities within the empire. As such praetor could not rely upon the law of any one city for the criteria of his judgments, he naturally turned his eyes to the codes of all the cities from which came the swarm of litigants before him. In the generalizations necessarily made upon such broad data, we have the begin ning of comparative jurisprudence, whose
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first fruit at Rome was the ascertainment of the fact that there are certain uniform and universal conceptions of justice common to all civilized peoples. Before this new growth, watered by the learning of the jurisconsults, reached its maturity, the in tellectual life of Rome passed under the dominion of her subjects in Attica and Peloponessus just after they had yielded to the ascendency of the Stoic philosophers, whowere ever striving to discover in the opera tions of nature, physical, moral, and intel lectual, some uniform and universal force pervading all things that could be desig nated as the law of nature — the embodi ment of universal reason, identical with Zeus, the supreme ruler of the universe. Through the mind of the Roman lawyer that splendid conception entered into the jus gentium as an expanding and enriching' force that finally lifted it into a higher sphere. In that way a broad principle of Greek philosophy became so blended with a particular branch of Roman commercial law that the Antonine jurisconsults finally assumed the position that the jus gentium and the jus naturae were identical. Long before that time, however, Cicero had rec ognized the fact, and had declared in his gorgeous phrase that the fruit of the union was not one law for Rome, and another law for Athens, one law to-day, and another law tomorrow, but one eternal and immortal law for all time and for all nations, as God the common master and ruler, is one. Such was the general nature of the pro cess by which the primitive and unelastic Roman code was liberalized and adapted to the changed conditions of an expanding; society through the growth of that system of judge-made law called equity, built up alongside of the primitive code by the juris consults during the period that preceded the overthrow of the republic and the advent of Augustus. While the "answers of the learned" varied a good deal at different periods, they always consisted of explana tory glosses on authoritative written docu
