Page:Ancient Law.djvu/191

178 rights and duties. Inverting this order we have therefore to inquire what is a universitas juris; what is a universal succession; what is the form of universal succession which is called an inheritance. And there are also two further questions, independent to some extent of the points I have mooted, but demanding solution before the subject of Wills can be exhausted. These are, how came an inheritance to be controlled in any case by the testator's volition, and what is the nature of the instrument by which it came to be controlled?

The first question relates to the universitas juris; that is, a university (or bundle) of rights and duties. A universitas juris is a collection of rights and duties united by the single circumstance of their having belonged at one time to some one person. It is as it were, the legal clothing of some given individual. It is not formed by grouping together any rights and any duties. It can only be constituted by taking all the rights and all the duties of a particular person. The tie which so connects a number of rights of property, rights of way, rights to legacies, duties of specific performance, debts, obligations to compensate wrongs—which so connects all these legal privileges and duties together as to constitute them a universitas juris, is the fact of their having attached to some individual capable of exercising them. Without this fact there is no university of rights and duties. The