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Justinian I · The Digest of Justinian §35.1.25.pr

Exclusion of Children by Another Man from Legacy Condition

Passage 5356 of 9271 · Latin

Summary

The author argues that when a husband bequeaths land to his wife on the condition of her having children, if she divorces him, has children with another man, and returns, those children do not fulfill the condition, as the testator could not have intended them.

[IDEM libro sexagesimo nono digestorum. ] §35.1.25.prCum uir uxori, quandoque liberos habebit, fundum legat, si mulier diuortio facto liberos ex alio procreauerit, deinde soluto secundo matrimonio ad priorem maritum redierit, non intellegitur expleta condicio, quod testatorem uerisimile non est de his liberis sensisse, qui se uino ex alio suscepti fuissent.
[By the same writer in the sixty-ninth book of his Digests.] When a husband bequeaths a tract of land to his wife, "whenever she shall have children", if the woman, after a divorce has been made, has procreated children by another man, and then, the second marriage having been dissolved, has returned to her prior husband, the condition is not understood to be fulfilled, because it is not likely that the testator had in mind those children who had been begotten by another while he himself was alive.

Notes

  1. 35.1.25.prquandoque liberos habebit — A conditional clause attached to the legacy, where the conjunction quandoque governs the future indicative habebit, indicating an indefinite future time or condition "whenever she shall have."
  2. 35.1.25.prtestatorem uerisimile non est ... sensisse — An accusative with infinitive (A.C.I.) construction where the accusative testatorem and the perfect infinitive sensisse act as the subject of the impersonal expression uerisimile non est ("it is not probable that..."). The phrase de his liberis is the complement of sensisse.
  3. 35.1.25.prse uiuo — An ablative absolute of a pronoun and an adjective (se and uiuo, the ablative of uiuus), meaning "while he himself was alive." The reflexive pronoun se refers back to the logical subject of the main clause (the testator, testatorem) rather than the subject of the relative clause itself.

Cite this passage

Justinian I, The Digest of Justinian §35.1.25.pr. Humanitext Reader, https://reader.humanitext.ai/en/text/urn:cts:latinLit:phi2806.phi002.humanitext-lat1:35.1.25.pr

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