droit

Fr./dr(w)a, Engl. /droyt/

In French law, right, justice, equity, law, the whole body of law; also a right. This term exhibits the same ambiguity which is discoverable in the German equivalent, "recht" and the English word "right."

On the one hand, these terms answer to the Roman "jus," and thus indicate law in the abstract, considered as the foundation of all rights, or the complex of underlying moral principles which impart the character of justice to all positive law, or give it an ethical content.

Taken in this abstract sense, the terms may be adjectives, in which case they are equivalent to "just," or nouns, in which case they may be paraphrased by the expressions "justice," "morality," or "equity."

On the other hand, they serve to point out a right; that is, a power, privilege, faculty, or demand, inherent in one person, and incident upon another. In the latter signification, droit (or recht or right) is the correlative of "duty" or "obligation." In the former sense, it may be considered as opposed to wrong, injustice, or the absence of law.

Droit has the further ambiguity that it is sometimes used to denote the existing body of law considered as one whole, or the sum total of a number of individual laws taken together.

See jus

- recht

- right.

A person was said to have droit droit, plurimum juris, and plurimum possessionis, when he had the freehold, the fee, and the property in him. In old English law, law; right; a writ of right.

Autre droit, The right of another