Definition
Latin: "According to nature" or "naturally." A maxim of civil law origin used to express that a legal rule, obligation, or distribution follows from natural principle rather than from positive enactment. The phrase appears most often as the introductory word or qualifier in legal maxims, signaling that what follows is grounded in natural reason or the inherent logic of a legal relationship.
The most significant maxim in which the phrase appears is: Secundum naturam est commoda cujusque rei eum sequi, quem sequentur incommoda — "It is according to nature that the advantages of any thing should follow him to whom the disadvantages attach." This principle, drawn from the Digest of Justinian (Dig. 50.17.10), articulates a foundational idea in private law: that benefit and burden travel together. The party who enjoys the profits or gains of a thing must also bear its risks and liabilities.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Naturally.
Historical common usage: The phrase is Latin and does not appear as a standalone entry in Webster's 1913; its component words (natura, naturalis) carry the ordinary senses of "nature" as the physical world, inherent character, or the order of things.
The gap matters here not because common and legal meanings conflict, but because the legal use is more precise than the general sense of "naturally." In legal discourse, secundum naturam does not mean merely "as one would expect" — it invokes natural reason as a normative ground for legal rules, placing those rules in the tradition of natural law reasoning that shaped Roman and civilian jurisprudence.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter secundum naturam most often embedded within longer Latin maxims rather than as a standalone term. Its function is structural: it signals that the rule following it claims authority from natural reason or the logic of a legal relationship, not from a specific statute or decree.
The maxim from Digest 50.17.10 — linking benefit and burden — has had a long afterlife. It appears in treatises on agency, suretyship, property, and contract as a shorthand for the principle that a party cannot claim the advantages of a position while escaping its corresponding obligations. Researchers tracing this principle through English and American common law should be alert to the fact that courts often applied the underlying idea without quoting the Latin, and that civilian treatise writers cited the maxim more explicitly than common law judges typically did.
When searching historical legal sources, note that the phrase may appear in a variety of transliterations and abbreviations. In older treatise indexes, it may be listed under "secundum" or under the first substantive word of the maxim it introduces. Burrill's is the primary dictionary source for this entry; Bouvier's Law Dictionary addresses related maxims of natural reason but does not carry a dedicated entry for this phrase.
The phrase also connects to broader natural law vocabulary — ius naturale, ratio naturalis, ex natura rei — that runs through civil law and early common law writing. A researcher following secundum naturam will quickly find themselves in that wider literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the principal lexicographic record. Burrill quotes the maxim from the Digest directly and translates it cleanly, without extended commentary. His treatment reflects the mid-nineteenth-century American legal dictionary convention of presenting civil law maxims as authoritative background principles rather than as operative rules of decision.
What Burrill does not address — and what later historical dictionaries largely pass over — is the reception history of this specific maxim in common law adjudication. The principle it encodes (benefit follows burden) circulated widely in equity and common law reasoning, but courts rarely cited Dig. 50.17.10 by name. The maxim thus occupies an unusual position: regularly invoked in treatise literature, but often applied sub silentio in case law.
Jurisdictional Note
As a civil law maxim, secundum naturam is most explicitly cited in civilian and mixed jurisdictions (Louisiana, Scotland, Quebec, South Africa). In purely common law jurisdictions, the underlying principle is operative but the Latin phrase itself appears mainly in scholarly and treatise contexts rather than in judicial opinions.