Definition
De lege Rhodia de jactu is a Latin phrase meaning "concerning the Rhodian law of jettison." It refers to the ancient legal principle, attributed to the maritime customs of the island of Rhodes and preserved in Roman law, governing the allocation of losses when cargo or equipment is thrown overboard (jettisoned) from a vessel in order to save the ship and remaining cargo from peril. Under this doctrine, the loss caused by the deliberate jettison is not borne solely by the owner of the goods sacrificed, but is instead shared proportionally among all parties whose property was preserved by the act — the shipowner and the owners of the surviving cargo alike. The phrase thus names both a source of law and a principle: the Rhodian law as the foundational authority for what maritime and common law developed into the doctrine of general average.
Common Confusion
The Burrill entry reproduced in these source materials is misattributed. The text given under this headword — describing a writ commanding wardens of the port of Dover to permit named persons to cross the sea — is the definition for DE LICENTIA TRANSFRETANDI, not for de lege Rhodia de jactu. This appears to be a transcription or pagination error in the dictionary. Researchers relying on Burrill's entry as printed should disregard the text as inapplicable to this term and treat it as a source defect rather than a competing definition.
Why It Matters in Research
This term functions primarily as a historical marker rather than an operative legal phrase in modern practice. Researchers encountering it in older sources — Roman law digests, admiralty treatises, early English maritime cases, or continental law merchant materials — should understand it as shorthand for the Rhodian jettison rule and its derivatives. The phrase appears most frequently in scholarly commentary on the origins of general average, a doctrine that remains very much alive in modern maritime law under instruments such as the York-Antwerp Rules.
The Burrill misattribution is a concrete research trap: any researcher using Burrill as a shortcut to understand this term will be directed entirely to the wrong doctrine. Cross-checking against admiralty-specific sources is essential. Similarly, because the phrase invokes "Rhodian law" — a body of rules known almost entirely through Roman-era transmission rather than original Rhodian sources — claims about what "the Rhodians" actually required should be treated with scholarly caution in historical legal writing.
Corpus researchers should note that this term connects the Law Mind materials on Roman law and the law merchant to the admiralty and shipping law cluster. It also provides an entry point into the broader intellectual history of lex mercatoria and the question of how ancient commercial customs were received into common law admiralty jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry for this term is, as noted above, substantively incorrect — the text provided describes an entirely different writ. This is a significant failure for a source dictionary, and it underscores the general limitation of nineteenth-century legal dictionaries when handling learned Latin phrases of Roman and classical maritime origin. Burrill was far stronger on common law procedure and pleading than on Roman or admiralty law.
The genuine historical content must be drawn from other sources. The doctrine's classical foundation is Digest 14.2 (De lege Rhodia de jactu), a title of Justinian's Digest that transmits the core rule: when goods are jettisoned for the common safety, the loss falls on all in proportion to their stake in the venture. This passage from the Digest was the standard reference point for commentators on general average across the medieval and early modern periods, and the phrase itself became a term of art precisely because of that citation. Historical legal dictionaries of the civilian tradition are more reliable guides to this term than common law dictionaries of Burrill's type.
Jurisdictional Note
The underlying doctrine — general average and the proportional sharing of jettison losses — is recognized across all major maritime jurisdictions, though its modern form is governed by contract (typically the York-Antwerp Rules) rather than by direct invocation of Rhodian or Roman law. The Latin phrase itself is rarely encountered in contemporary judicial opinions or pleadings and functions almost exclusively in historical and comparative maritime law scholarship.