Definition
Nus recipiendi (more properly jus recipiendi) is a Roman law term designating an urban praedial servitude — a right attached to land rather than to a person — by which the owner of a dominant tenement holds an entitlement against the owner of a neighboring servient tenement. The right has two recognized forms: (1) the right to project one's roof or eaves over the land of another, allowing rainwater or structural overhangs to extend beyond the property boundary; and (2) the right to discharge water through a house drain that runs across or opens upon the neighbor's land.
As with all praedial servitudes in Roman law, nus recipiendi burdened the land itself, not any individual owner. The servitude transferred with both the dominant and servient estates upon sale or conveyance.
Common Confusion
The entry as it appears in Bouvier's conflates two adjacent dictionary entries — nus recipiendi and jus strictum — in a single passage, a typographical artifact of the print edition. Researchers should not read any substantive connection between these terms. Jus strictum (law interpreted in its utmost rigor) and jus recipiendi (a specific property servitude) are entirely unrelated concepts that happen to appear in sequence. Additionally, the headword "nus recipiendi" in Bouvier is almost certainly a corrupted or abbreviated rendering of "jus recipiendi," the standard Latin formulation. Researchers encountering "nus recipiendi" in historical indices should treat it as a variant spelling pointing to the same concept.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The servitude encompasses two specific entitlements as recognized in Roman sources:
1. Right of eave projection (stillicidium immittendi variant): The dominant owner may extend the roof structure, eaves, or overhang across the boundary onto the servient land.
2. Right of drain discharge (cloacae immittendae variant): The dominant owner may run a house drain through or onto the servient tenement, directing wastewater or surface runoff across that land.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears rarely in American legal sources and almost exclusively in materials treating Roman law foundations or comparative property law. Researchers should be aware of several navigational challenges:
First, the headword itself is unreliable. "Nus recipiendi" is not standard Latin — the expected form is "jus recipiendi" — and its appearance as a standalone headword in Bouvier likely reflects a compositor's error or abbreviation convention from the print edition. Searching for "nus recipiendi" across the Law Mind corpus will surface only sources that reproduce Bouvier's exact wording; searching "jus recipiendi" will reach the broader literature.
Second, this servitude belongs to the Roman category of urban servitudes (servitutes praediorum urbanorum), as opposed to rural servitudes. Researchers working on the historical development of easement law in civil law jurisdictions — particularly Louisiana, Quebec, or systems derived from Spanish or French civil codes — will find jus recipiendi relevant background for understanding rights of drainage and lateral support. Common law equivalents are imperfect but include easements for surface water drainage and rights of eave overhang.
Third, because Bouvier's entry is compressed and runs into adjacent headwords without clear separation, corpus researchers should treat any passage containing "nus recipiendi" as potentially covering multiple distinct concepts bundled by the print layout.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind historical shelf that carries this headword, and the entry is brief to the point of being skeletal. Bouvier defines it simply as an urban servitude giving the owner a right to project his roof over another's land or to open a house drain upon it — accurate as far as it goes, but offering no procedural context, no treatment of how the servitude was created or extinguished, and no discussion of the analogous rights in modern civil law systems.
What Bouvier misses: Roman law distinguished carefully between stillicidium (the right to allow drip from eaves onto a neighbor's land) and the broader right of projection; jus recipiendi in its classical usage carried nuances about the direction of discharge and the construction of drains that Bouvier's definition collapses. Researchers needing doctrinal depth beyond Bouvier must turn to primary Roman sources or to civilian treatises on servitudes directly.
Jurisdictional Note
This concept has no direct application in common law jurisdictions, which address analogous situations through easement doctrine. In Louisiana and other mixed civil law jurisdictions, the Civil Code's treatment of predial servitudes and drainage rights reflects the Roman heritage that jus recipiendi represents, though the specific terminology does not appear in modern civil codes.