Lat. In Roman law. A consideration which is voluntary; that is to say, a gratuitous gift, or such like. It was opposed to onerosa causa, which denoted a valuable consideration. It was a principle of the Roman law that two lucrative causes could not concur in the same person as regarded the same thing; that is to say, that, when the same thing was bequeathed to a person by two different testators, he could not have the thing (or its value) twice over. Brown.