on which is called an inheritance? And there are also two
further questions, independent to some extent of the points I have
mooted, but demanding solution before the subject of Wills can be
exhausted. These are, how came an inheritance to be controlled in any
case by the testator's volition, and what is the nature of the
instrument by which it came to be controlled?

The first question relates to the _universitas juris_; that is, a
university (or bundle) of rights and duties. A _universitas juris_ is
a collection of rights and duties united by the single circumstance of
their having belonged at one time to some one person. It is, as it
were, the legal clothing of some given individual. It is not formed by
grouping together _any_ rights and _any_ duties. It can only be
constituted by taking all the rights and all the duties of a
particular person. The tie which so 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. Without this
_fact_ there is no university of rights and duties. The expression
_universitas juris_ is not classical, but for the notion jurisprudence
is exclusively indebted to Roman law; nor is it at all difficult to
seize. We must endeavour to collect under one conception the whole set
of legal relations in which each one of us stands to the rest of the
world. These, whatever be their character and composition, make up
together a _universitas juris_; and there is but little danger of
mistake in forming the notion, if we are only careful to remember that
duties enter into it quite as much as rights. Our duties may
overbalance our rights. A man may owe more than he is worth, and
therefore if a money value is set on his collective legal relations he
may be what is called insolvent. But for all that the entire group of
rights and duties which centres in him is not the less a "juris
universitas."

We come next to a "universal succession." A universal succession is a
succession to a _universitas juris_. It occurs when one man is
invested with the legal clothing of another, becoming at the same
moment subject to all his liabilities and entitled to all his rights.
In order that the universal succession may be true and perfec