Definition
Jus non sacrum (Latin: "non-sacred law") is a term from Roman public law designating that branch of the jus publicum concerned with civil governance rather than religious affairs. It encompassed the powers and duties of civil magistrates, the preservation of public order, and the regulation of relationships between persons and the state. It stood in contrast to jus sacrum, which governed religious institutions, priesthoods, and sacred rites. Together, jus sacrum and jus non sacrum composed the full scope of Roman public law.
In practical terms, jus non sacrum covered what modern legal systems would recognize as administrative law, police power, and public order regulation — the machinery of civil government operating apart from any religious mandate.
Common Confusion
Jus non sacrum is easily conflated with jus publicum generally. Jus publicum was the broader category; jus non sacrum was a subdivision of it, distinguishing civil-governmental law from its sacred counterpart. Researchers should also take care not to confuse jus non sacrum with jus privatum, which governed relations between private individuals rather than the relationship between persons and the state. The sacred/non-sacred division and the public/private division are two distinct axes of Roman law classification, and they intersect, not overlap.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in works on Roman law history and in 19th-century Anglo-American legal dictionaries that drew on Roman sources to explain foundational public law concepts. Researchers are unlikely to encounter jus non sacrum in case law or statutory materials; its utility is primarily conceptual and historical.
The most important research connection is to the police power doctrine. Bouvier's entry explicitly draws the analogy: jus non sacrum is described as the Roman antecedent of what American constitutional law would develop into the police power — the inherent authority of the state to regulate for the health, safety, and welfare of the public. When 19th-century treatise writers and judges were constructing the theoretical foundations of police power, Roman public law concepts including jus non sacrum provided the intellectual scaffolding. Tracing that lineage helps explain why early American police power doctrine was framed in such sweeping, sovereignty-rooted terms.
A secondary research note: the term rarely appears in English-language sources outside of Bouvier and the Roman law treatises Bouvier cited. Researchers working in primary Roman sources or Continental civil law scholarship will find richer treatment. Within the Law Mind corpus, the term functions mainly as a conceptual bridge term — useful for understanding how editors and treatise writers of the 19th century organized public law theory, not as a term of art with independent doctrinal application.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the primary English-language treatment of this term. Bouvier draws directly on William C. Morey's Outlines of Roman Law (cited as Morey, Rom. L. 223) for the substantive content, indicating that by the time Bouvier was incorporating this material, the term had migrated from Roman law scholarship into Anglo-American legal reference literature largely for comparative and theoretical purposes.
Bouvier's definition does two things: it accurately situates jus non sacrum within Roman public law as the civil-governance counterpart to sacred law, and it then offers the anachronistic but instructive equivalence to the police power. That equivalence is an editorial gloss reflecting 19th-century American legal thinking, not a feature of Roman law itself. Researchers should read it as reflecting the period in which Bouvier wrote rather than as a precise characterization of Roman jurisprudence.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus provide independent treatment of this term. Its absence from sources like Black's early editions suggests it remained a term of art confined to Roman law scholarship rather than achieving broad circulation in common law reference works.
Jurisdictional Note
Jus non sacrum is a Roman law term with no direct application in any modern common law jurisdiction. Its relevance to American, English, or other common law research is historical and theoretical only.