BUTION ; DESCENT.
NEX17M (Lat.). 7.n Roman Law. The transfer of the ownership of a thing, or the transfer of a thing to a creditor as a security.
2. In one sense nesum includes mancipium; in another sense, niatecipium and nexunt are opposed, in the same way as sale and mortgage or pledge are opposed. The formal part of both trend actions consisted in a tronsfer per Bea et libram. The person who became nexue by the effect of nexum placed himself in a servile condition, not becoming a slave, his ingenuitout being only in suspense, and was said nexum itdre. The phrases nexi datio, nexi liberatio, respectively express the contracting and the release from the obligation.
3. The Roman law as to the payment of har rowed money was very strict. A curious passage of Genius (xx. 1) gives us the ancient mode of legal procedure in the caoe of debt, as fixed by the Twelve Tables. If the debtor admitted the debt, or had been condemned in the amount of tbe debt by a judex, he had thirty days allowed him for payment. At the expiration of this time he was liable to the mantle injeetio, and ultimately to he assigned over to the creditor (addietue) by the sentence of the praetor. The creditor Wa9 required to keep him for sixty days in chains, during which time be publicly exposed the debtor, on three nutedinie, and proclaimed the amount of his debt. If no person released the prisoner by paying the debt, the creditor might sell him as a slave or pnt him to death. If there were several creditors, the
letter of the law allowed them to cut tbe debtor in pieces and take their share of his body in propor tion to their debt. Gellius says that there was no instance of a creditor ever having adopted this extreme mode of satisfying his debt. But the creditor might treat the debtor, who was addietue, as a slave, and compel him to work out hia debt; and the treatment WaS often very severe. In tbia passage Genius does not speak of nexi, but only of addied, which is sometimes alleged aa evidence of the identity of nexus and addictue, but it proved no such identity. If a nexue is what he is here supposed to be, the laws of tbe Twelve Tables could not apply; for when a man became nexus with respect to one creditor, be could not become nexue to another; and if he became nexus to several at once, in this case the creditors must abide by their contract in taking a joint security. This law of the Twelve Tables only applied to the oase of a debtor being assigned over by a judicial sentence to several debtors, and it provided far a settlement of their cofiflicting claims. The precise eondition of a nexue has, however, been a sublet:it of much discussion among scholars. Smith, Diet. Rom. dc Gr. Antiq.;