ABSTRACT
To the dictum that Jean Bodin's Republique is a work more read about than read, the author would like to add the following codicil by way of a general theme: those who have read the work have read only the text. Bodin's quarried medieval arguments about the interpenetration of natural law and civil law does not mean that he slavishly followed or copied the medieval legists. He admired their works because they united actual legal practice with juristic theory in a way that his humanistic education had shunned. Bodin magnifies the scope of natural law by closely associating it with equity, and by stressing the difference between lex and ius. In a host of instances of lex which operate in the world of jurisprudence, the discriminating and learned eye will see that the principle of ius is actually at stake.
