- Jean Domat (1625-1696) was one of the few later French scholars of Roman law of international significance. He is principally known from this elaborate legal digest, in three quarto volumes, under the title of Lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel (1689, with 68 later editions), an undertaking for which Louis XIV settled on him a pension of 2,000 livres. A fourth volume, Le droit public, was published in 1697, a year after his death. After Hugo Doneau's more thorough but less consistent Commentarii iuris civilis (1589), the work was the first of this type of pan-European significance. It was to become one of the principal sources of the ancien droit on which the Napoleonic Code was later founded. Domat's work was in line with earlier Humanist attempts to transform the seemingly random historical sources of law into a rational system of rules. However, as a supporter of a Cartesian juridical order, Domat endeavoured to found all law upon ethical or religious principles, his motto being "L'homme est fait par Dieu et pour Dieu" ("Man was made by God and for God"). The work was thus an attempt to establish a system of French law on the basis of moral principles, and it presented the contents of the Codex Iustinianis in the form of a new system of natural law. Subsequently appended to the Lois civiles, a selection in Lation of the laws in the Digesta and the Codex Justinianus was the 'Legum delectus' (Paris, 1700). The large folio 1723-edition was revised, corrected & edited by Louis de Héricourt du Vatier (1687-1752) with notes by Claude Berroyer (1655-1735) and Louis Chevalier (1663-1744). This is a new edition.