Definition
A consilhois (from the Latin consilium, meaning advice or counsel) is a historical civil law term denoting a counsellor — a person who gives legal advice or opinion. The term functions essentially as a descriptive title for one who acts in a counseling or advisory legal capacity, as distinguished from an advocate who pleads before a tribunal. Some civil law writers employed the term as an equivalent to or substitute for the phrase a responsis, which designated an official or professional adviser charged with providing formal legal responses or opinions.
Common Confusion
A consilhois and a responsis are treated by some civil law writers as interchangeable, but they are not universally equivalent. A responsis (or a responsis prudentium) carries a more specific connotation rooted in the Roman practice of juristic response — the formal legal opinions of recognized jurists that carried authoritative weight in Roman law. A consilhois, by contrast, emphasizes the advisory or counseling relationship more broadly, without necessarily implying the same institutional authority. Researchers should not assume that every use of one term maps precisely onto the other across all sources and periods.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a narrow technical term of the civil law tradition and will appear almost exclusively in historical sources, particularly those engaging with Roman or Continental legal systems. Researchers encountering a consilhois in primary or secondary sources should treat it as a role-descriptor synonymous with legal counsellor in the civil law sense — not as a term with ongoing doctrinal significance in common law jurisdictions.
The principal research trap here is terminological substitution. Because some civil law writers used a consilhois interchangeably with a responsis, a researcher searching for one term across historical texts may miss passages that use the other. Any corpus search treating these as distinct concepts risks incomplete retrieval. Cross-searching both terms — along with related Latin forms such as consilium and responsa — is advisable when surveying civil law materials from the medieval and early modern periods.
The term also appears in connection with Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, referenced in Black's as the source for the cognate term Apocrisarius (an imperial or ecclesiastical respondent or messenger). This signals that a consilhois belongs to the same lexical cluster as terms describing official advisory and response functions in Roman, Byzantine, and early ecclesiastical legal contexts. Researchers working in canon law or medieval civil law will find the Spelman glossary a relevant companion source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. Black's treats the term concisely: it is of counsel, a counsellor, used in civil law by some writers instead of a responsis, with a cross-reference to Spelman's treatment of Apocrisarius. The entry does not elaborate on the precise scope of the advisory function or whether a consilhois held any formal institutional office, as distinct from being a private practitioner of legal counsel.
What the historical dictionary sources do not address is the evolution of this term across different civil law traditions, or the degree to which the role of a consilhois was formally recognized versus informally practiced. The sparse treatment in Black's reflects the term's limited relevance to Anglo-American common law — it survives in the legal dictionary tradition primarily as a point of historical and comparative reference rather than as an operative legal concept.