Definition
Latin: "by good grace" or "by free will." In Roman law, a form of divorce effected by mutual consent of the parties, without assignment of cause or upon mere pretexts. Unlike divorce for fault, bona gratia dissolution required no accusation, judicial finding, or formal ground — the parties simply renounced their marital engagement by common agreement. The term captures both the voluntary character of the separation and its amicable (or at least uncontested) nature.
Common Confusion
Bona gratia is sometimes loosely grouped with other Latin bona- phrases — particularly bona fide (in good faith) and bona vacantia (ownerless goods) — because of shared root terminology. These terms have no substantive connection. Bona gratia concerns the mode of dissolving a marriage; bona fide concerns the quality of a party's knowledge or belief; bona vacantia is a property doctrine. A researcher encountering any bona- phrase in a historical source should not assume shared legal family or interchangeable meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Bona gratia is a term of Roman civil law that rarely surfaces in common-law sources. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in two contexts: (1) historical treatises on civil law or comparative family law, particularly works tracing the reception of Roman matrimonial doctrine into Continental European systems; and (2) ecclesiastical and canon law sources, where the tension between consensual dissolution and the indissolubility of marriage was a recurring doctrinal problem.
The term has no operative function in modern Anglo-American family law. No-fault divorce statutes across common-law jurisdictions achieve a functionally similar result — consensual, cause-free dissolution — through entirely different legal mechanisms and vocabulary. A researcher working on the history of no-fault divorce reform may find bona gratia useful as a conceptual predecessor or comparative reference, but should not treat it as a direct ancestor of modern statutory no-fault divorce, which has distinct procedural and policy roots.
In historical sources, bona gratia appears as a term of art within Roman classification schemes for divorce. Burrill's citations to the Digest, Code, and Novels locate the doctrine squarely within Justinianic sources. Researchers using pre-Justinian materials or post-classical glossators should be alert to shifts in how the concept was framed, as later imperial legislation — particularly Justinian's Novels — imposed restrictions on consent-based divorce that complicated the earlier, freer bona gratia model.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition: bona gratia means voluntarily or by mutual consent, applied to a Roman-law divorce by agreement. Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence offer minimal entries, essentially confirming the definition without elaboration. Black's adds the detail that the separation could occur without any assigned cause or upon mere pretexts — a significant nuance suggesting that even a fictional or thin ground sufficed, provided both parties consented.
Burrill provides the most substantively useful entry, citing specific passages from the Digest (24.1.62; 40.9.14.4), the Code (5.13.16), and Justinian's Novels (Nov. 22, c. 4), as well as Taylor's Civil Law and Calvin's Lexicon. These citations are the appropriate starting points for any researcher seeking to trace the doctrine in primary sources. The reference to Taylor's Civil Law (a standard 19th-century civil law treatise) places bona gratia within the broader accessible scholarship of the period.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the evolution of consensual divorce under later Roman law, where Justinian alternately restricted and then partially restored the bona gratia mechanism, or the doctrine's treatment in canon law, where the consensual dissolution of a valid marriage was generally impermissible. Researchers should not rely solely on dictionary entries for a complete picture of the term's history.
Jurisdictional Note
Bona gratia is a term of Roman civil law with no direct counterpart in common-law jurisdictions. It retains relevance primarily in civil-law systems and in historical or comparative legal scholarship. Researchers working in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed civil-law jurisdictions may encounter the concept in older doctrinal materials, though modern family law statutes in those jurisdictions use contemporary vocabulary.