Definition
Juris privati (Latin: "of private right") is a phrase used in property and public law to classify things or interests that are subjects of private ownership and control, as distinguished from things held in public trust or belonging to the state. Property or rights characterized as juris privati may be exclusively owned, alienated, and enjoyed by private persons, free from the overriding claims of sovereign right that attach to juris publici property.
The phrase appears most often in discussions of property held by the Crown or state, where the question is whether a given resource — land, water, a foreshore, a fishery — is available for private appropriation or remains under public dominion. To call something juris privati is to conclude that private ownership has attached and that ordinary property rights govern.
Common Confusion
Juris privati is frequently paired with or contrasted against juris publici ("of public right"), and the two phrases are sometimes loosely treated as a simple public/private binary. The distinction is more precise than that. Juris publici property is held for common use and cannot ordinarily be alienated; juris privati property is subject to full private ownership. A third category — property belonging to the Crown as a matter of prerogative but not dedicated to public use — does not map cleanly onto either phrase, and historical sources sometimes blur these lines. Researchers should not assume that a source's use of "juris privati" resolves every question about alienability or public access without examining the specific context.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in older common law materials and is rarely encountered in modern statutes or judicial opinions under this Latin label. Researchers are most likely to find it in:
— Pre-20th-century English and American cases and treatises dealing with foreshore rights, tidal waters, fisheries, and Crown lands, where courts classified resources as juris publici or juris privati to determine whether private title could be established.
— Treatises following Hale's Prerogatives of the Crown and hisAnalogy, which are the primary sources both Black's and Burrill's cite. Matthew Hale's framework for distinguishing public from private right in property was foundational for Anglo-American courts working through these questions well into the 19th century.
— Constitutional and public land debates in American law, where the juris publici/juris privati distinction was sometimes imported to analyze state ownership of navigable waters and submerged lands.
The operative trap for corpus researchers is that modern cases addressing the same substantive questions — public trust doctrine, navigability, state ownership of riverbeds — will rarely use this Latin phrase. A search limited to "juris privati" will recover the historical stratum but miss the modern doctrinal literature, which has translated the concept into English-language public trust and property frameworks. Researchers should cross-reference public trust doctrine entries and navigability materials to capture the full doctrinal arc.
Burrill's entry also appends, somewhat confusingly, material on the jurisconsulti of Roman law (the prudentes authorized to issue responsa prudentum). This appears to be a compositor or editorial error — a fragment of a neighboring entry (likely "jurisconsultus") that ran into the juris privati entry. Researchers using Burrill's should not treat that Roman law material as part of the juris privati definition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's and Burrill's define juris privati identically and trace the phrase to the same source: Hale's Analogy, section 23. Neither dictionary develops the concept beyond that single-line definition, which reflects the phrase's status as a term of art whose meaning was assumed to be well understood by its intended audience — common lawyers already familiar with Hale.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply: any discussion of how courts applied the juris privati/juris publici distinction in practice, the procedural consequences of the classification, or the tension between Hale's framework and evolving American public land doctrine. For those questions, researchers must go directly to Hale's treatises and to the 19th-century case law that engaged with them.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase originates in English common law and is most at home in English and early American legal materials. American courts occasionally employed the juris privati/juris publici distinction through the 19th century, but modern U.S. doctrine has largely displaced the Latin terminology. Civil law jurisdictions use distinct frameworks for public versus private domain (domaine public/domaine privé in French-influenced systems) that do not map directly onto the juris privati concept.