Definition
Jus honorarium (Latin: "honorary law") is the body of Roman law derived from the official edicts of magistrates — principally the praetors, but also the curule aediles — as distinguished from the jus civile, the older law of the Roman citizen body rooted in statute and custom. The term derives from the Latin honor or honoris, meaning public office or magistracy, and reflects the fact that this law issued from the dignitary power of those offices rather than from formal legislative enactment. The praetors, as judicial magistrates, announced at the beginning of their annual terms the legal principles they would apply and the remedies they would recognize; over time these announcements — the edicts — accumulated into a coherent and influential legal system parallel to, and often corrective of, the civil law. The curule aediles contributed edicts in their own sphere, principally relating to markets and sales. Together, the praetorian and aedilician edicts formed the jus honorarium.
Common Confusion
Jus honorarium is often loosely treated as synonymous with jus praetorium. The two overlap substantially — the praetorian edict was far the larger and more important part of the honorarium — but jus honorarium is the broader category, encompassing the aedilician edicts as well. Researchers encountering either term in historical sources should not assume identical scope. Bouvier draws this distinction explicitly, noting that the designation applied to praetorian edicts and also, on occasion, to edicts of the curule aediles.
Why It Matters in Research
Jus honorarium is a critical concept for understanding Roman private law and, by extension, the civilian tradition that shaped continental European legal systems, Scots law, Louisiana law, and the historical development of equity in English and American jurisprudence. Several research considerations apply:
First, the structural parallel between jus honorarium and equity is not incidental. Commentators — including those cited by Burrill (Spence's Chancery) — explicitly drew the analogy between the Roman praetor's corrective jurisdiction and the English Chancellor's equity jurisdiction. Researchers working on the history of equity, the conscience doctrine, or the origins of equitable remedies will find jus honorarium appearing as a reference point in early Chancery scholarship.
Second, the term signals a particular phase of Roman legal development. The edict was eventually consolidated and fixed under Hadrian (the Edictum Perpetuum, attributed to Julian, c. 130 CE), after which the praetor's law-making role effectively ended. Sources written before and after that consolidation treat jus honorarium differently — living, flexible magistrate-made law on one side of that divide; a closed, authoritative text on the other. Dating the source you are reading matters.
Third, in civilian jurisdictions and comparative law scholarship, jus honorarium often appears in discussions of judicial lawmaking, legal gaps (lacunae), and the legitimacy of judge-made law. The historical example of the praetor is invoked in debates over whether courts can and should supplement enacted law. Researchers in legal theory and comparative law will encounter it in that normative context, not merely the historical one.
Fourth, the Law Mind corpus contains historical treatises, chancery materials, and civil law digests where jus honorarium may appear without definition or gloss. Burrill's cross-references (the Institutes, the Digest, Hallifax, Mackeldey, Spence) are reliable guides to the primary and secondary tradition, and those works, where available in the corpus, will provide fuller context than any dictionary entry.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five source dictionaries converge on the core definition without meaningful disagreement: jus honorarium is the magistrate-made body of Roman law, centered on the praetorian edict. The variation is in depth and emphasis.
Black's (both editions) offers the most stripped-down version — adequate for identification, insufficient for research context. Rapalje & Lawrence matches Black's brevity and adds little. Bouvier is more useful, noting the aedilician dimension explicitly and situating the jus honorarium within the broader development of Roman jurisprudence as a response to population growth, commercial complexity, and expanding power — the "expanding and elastic jurisprudence" formulation (citing Howe, Studies in the Civil Law) is a genuinely instructive characterization. Burrill is the most technically precise of the five: he gives the Latin gloss ("honorary law"), identifies the etymological root (ab honore prætoris — from the public offices held by praetors and aediles), cites the Institutes and Digest directly, and cross-references Hallifax, Mackeldey, and Spence's Chancery. For a researcher wanting to trace the term into primary sources, Burrill is the entry point.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss or understate: the temporal arc of the jus honorarium — its emergence, development, and eventual petrification under Hadrian — is absent. None addresses the distinction between the edictum perpetuum and the annual edict. None engages seriously with the equity analogy beyond Burrill's cross-reference to Spence. A researcher relying solely on these entries will understand what the term means but not what it did historically or why it recurs in non-Roman legal literature.
Jurisdictional Note
Jus honorarium is a term of Roman law and does not apply directly in any modern common law jurisdiction. Its relevance in Anglo-American legal research is almost entirely historical and comparative — appearing in equity scholarship, civil law commentary, and jurisprudential writing. In Louisiana, Quebec, South Africa, and other mixed or civilian jurisdictions, the Roman law background carries more direct doctrinal weight, and jus honorarium may appear in scholarly literature as a genuine conceptual ancestor of judicial gap-filling.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Roman Law; Equity (History and Jurisdiction); Praetor; Jus Civile