Legatum
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence · Benjamin Vaughan Abbott · 1879
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence
A legacy
Legatum generis. A legacy by kind. A gift merely indicating the kind of thing, as "a horse," without designating which one.
Legatum liberationis
A legacy of a discharge.
Legatum nominis
A legacy of a debt or demand. LEGEM; LEGES. These words, inflexions of the Latin lex, a law, occur in some phrases.
Legem amittere
To lose the law; to lose the protection of the law; to forfeit one's civil rights; to become outlawed, excommunicate, or infamous.
Legem facere
To make law; to wage one's law; to make oath with compurgators in support of one's cause. An ancient proceeding in English practice to establish the justice of a cause by the oath of compurgators, instead of witnesses or other evidence. In this and the next phrase, legem, like law (q. v.), seems used in the sense of oath.
Legem vadiare
To wage law; to offer or to give pledge to make defence, by oath, with compurgators.
Leges Angliae
The laws of England, as distinguished from the civil law and other foreign systems. As in the famous phrase employed in narrating the attempt made in the parliament of Merton to enact for England the rule of the Scotch law, by which marriage of parents of an illegitimate child gives the rights of legitimacy: et omnes comites et barones una voce responderunt, quod nolunt leges Angliae mutare; and all the earls and barons with one voice answered that they will not change the laws of England, which have hitherto been used and approved. Stat. Merton, ch.
9; 1 Bl. Com. 19.
Leges posteriores priores contrarias abrogant. Later laws abrogate prior laws contrary to them; a subsequent statute operates as a repeal by implication of an earlier statute to a contrary effect. Since implied repeals carry with them a tacit reproach that the legislature has ignorantly, and without knowing it, made one act repugnant to and inconsistent with another, they are not favored by the law; hence for a later statute to operate as a repeal of a former one, the later statute must expressly negative the former, or the provisions of the two statutes must be so far inconsistent that both cannot be sustained. A modern extension of the doctrine is that a later law, which evidently deals with a subject completely, and appears intended to provide for it in full, may operate as a repeal of previous laws, although it might be possible, verbally, to retain both.