Jean Domat

Jean Domat, or Daumat (November 30, 1625 – March 14, 1696), French jurisconsult, was born at Clermont in Auvergne.

Biography

Domat studied the humaniora in Paris, where he befriended Blaise Pascal, and later law at Bourges. After his promotion in 1645, he practised law in Clermont and was appointed a crown prosecutor there in 1655. In 1683, he retired from this office with a pension from Louis XIV to concentrate on his scholarship.

Together with d'Autreserre, Favre and the Godefroy brothers, Domat was one of the few later French scholars of Roman law of international significance. His principal work, Les lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel (1689, 68 later editions) was to become one of the principal sources of the ancien droit on which the Code Napoleon was later founded. In line with earlier Humanist attempts to transform the seemingly random historical sources of law into a rational system of rules, it presented the contents of the Codex Iustinianis in the form of a new system of natural law. After Doneau's more thorough but less consistent Commentarii iuris civilis (1589), the Lois were the first work of this type of pan-European significance.