Universitas Juris Law and Legal Definition
Universitas juris is a Latin term which means ‘a quantity of things of all sorts.’ It includes both corporeal and incorporeal things that are taken together as a whole. In civil law universitas juris is a collection of rights and duties united by the single circumstance of their having belonged at one time to one person. The tie that connects a number of rights of property, rights of way, rights to legacies, duties of specific performance, debts, obligations, to compensate wrongs which so connects all these legal privileges and duties together as to constitute them a universitas juris is the fact of their having attached to some individual capable of exercising them. A universitas juris is always governed by the lex loci domicilii.
In Stewart v. B. & O. R. R. Co., 11 Ohio Dec. 232, 235 (Ohio Misc. 1901), the court held that, a universitas juris occurs when one man is invested with the legal clothing of another, becoming at the same moment subject to all his/her liabilities and entitled to all rights.
