Definition
Jus aqueductus (also rendered jus aqueductûs; the form "aqujedugtus" appearing in some printed editions is a typographical corruption of the Latin) is a civil law servitude granting the owner of a dominant estate the right to convey or channel water across or through the land of another — the servient estate. The right encompasses the construction and maintenance of channels, conduits, pipes, or ditches necessary to bring the water from its source, through the neighboring property, to the land of the person holding the servitude. It is a real right, meaning it attaches to the land rather than to any individual, and runs with the dominant estate.
The servitude does not confer ownership of the water itself, nor general access to the servient land; it is strictly limited to the passage of water along a defined course and by the means contemplated when the servitude was created or recognized.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter jus aqueductus primarily in civil law jurisdictions and in American states whose property law descends from Spanish or French civil law traditions — Louisiana most prominently, but also, in historical sources, Texas and California during and after their periods of Spanish and Mexican governance. In common law jurisdictions, the functional equivalent is a water easement or easement for a watercourse, and the terminology shifts accordingly; researchers moving between civil and common law sources for the same geographic region must track which legal system was operative at the time of the document.
The typographical corruption "aqujedugtus" (as well as variants such as "aquedugtus") appears in early printed editions of Black's and in some nineteenth-century American court reporters that set Latin terms in older typefaces. Recognizing these corruptions is essential when searching digitized historical sources: a search for the correct form "aqueductus" may miss documents that contain only the corrupted spelling, and vice versa.
Because this is a servitude of Roman origin, its fullest treatment in American legal sources appears in Louisiana jurisprudence and in treatises on civil law property. Researchers using only common law secondary sources will find the term absent or marginalized. The concept bridges naturally to discussions of predial servitudes, usufruct, and the broader Roman law of servitudes, all of which are more thoroughly developed in civil law dictionaries and encyclopedias than in general American legal references.
Water rights research in the American West may involve both the civil law servitude tradition and the distinct prior appropriation doctrine; these are not the same, and conflating them is a common research error.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the core definition in compact form: a servitude giving the landowner the right to bring water through or from the land of another. Black's correctly situates this as a civil law institution, which is the entry's most useful signal for researchers — it tells you immediately that the authoritative sources are Roman law texts, civil law commentators, and American jurisdictions with civilian heritage, not English common law reporters.
The entry is brief and does not address the scope of the right (what structures may be built, whether the right is exclusive or shared, how the course is fixed), the manner of creation, or the rules governing modification or extinction. Researchers needing operational detail will need to move beyond Black's to civil law property treatises or Louisiana codal commentary. The Digest of Justinian and the Institutes address aqueduct servitudes in some depth; later commentators including Domat and Pothier carry the doctrine into the early modern civil law tradition that directly influenced Louisiana's Civil Code.
Historical American legal dictionaries in the common law tradition largely omit this term or treat it only glancingly, reflecting the dominant common law orientation of those works. This absence is itself informative: it confirms the term's limited reach outside civilian jurisdictions.
Jurisdictional Note
Jus aqueductus is operative doctrine primarily in Louisiana, where predial servitudes including water servitudes are governed by the Civil Code. In other American states, courts occasionally encountered the term in title disputes involving Spanish or Mexican land grants, but generally translated the concept into common law easement analysis. In purely common law jurisdictions, the term has no independent legal force.