"This shows that Baldus was willing to accept any motivation on the part of the emperor as sufficient cause for infringing a requirement of the natural law, a law which Baldus identified with the ius gentium as a product of natural reason."

Joseph Canning, "Italian Juristic Thought and the Realities of Power in the Fourteenth Century,"  Politisches Denken und die Wirklichkeit der Macht im Mittelalter, edd. Joseph Canning and Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998) 236.