What obligatio anddominiumhave in common is that they are legal positions providing the plaintiff with a right to certain legal remedies (actiones) that are directed either against specific persons or against specific things, which in effect amounts to the plaintiff ’s right to a trial of law.79 Furthermore, obligatio and dominium make the claimant’s right tocivilis actios available regardless of whether or not the claim has a moral basis, for according to Roman law the morally binding power of an agreement is in itself not constitutive for the existence of a legally binding agreement.80 In Roman law the immediately legally binding power of formless as well as form-bound agreements alike is of post-classical, Justinian, date, and it is first in classical natural law that the idea that obligatio has a morally binding power per se gains acceptance. In fact, according to Roman law, not even the law in itself had the power to obligat an individual. Law merely gave the citizen the right to an actio by means of which he could enforce his claims.81 In classical natural law, obligatio and dominium were provided with different meanings from those they had under Roman law. To begin with, natural law construedobligatio to entail a claim that all debtors, wrongful possessors, and third parties were bound by a legal duty to behave in a certain specified manner. Classical natural law thus interpreted obligatio as if non-owners and the like were placed under a general duty to respect the rights of the owner or possessor of an object, rather than the second party of a contract being placed under obligation.82 This version of obligatio, however, must be contrasted with the opinion of the jurists of ancient Rome, to whomobligatio merely constituted a claim, p a r t v i , c h a p t e r 2 402 2 . 1. 3 the systemat ic re lat ionshi p betwe en Obligatio and Dominium 79 Hägerström, “Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” p. 612; Recht, Pflicht etc, p. 63. 80 Cf. Hägerström,“Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” pp. 585-593; Recht, Pflicht etc, pp. 29-38. 81 Hägerström,“Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” pp. 609-612 and 615; Recht, Pflicht etc, pp. 59-63 and 66. See also Schulz, Classical Roman Law, pp. 455-464. 82 Hägerström, “Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” p. 596; Recht, Pflicht etc, p. 43.
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