Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "from time" or "from the time of." In legal usage, it appears most commonly in the extended form *a tempore cujus contrarii memoria non existit* — "from time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary" — which is the formal expression for time immemorial or time out of mind. The phrase establishes the outer boundary of legal memory for the purpose of prescription: a right or custom claimed to have existed since before the reach of human recollection.
The phrase functions less as a standalone term than as a component of the prescriptive formula used in pleading. When a party asserted a prescriptive right — to an easement, a common, a franchise, or similar interest — the pleading convention required language tracking *a tempore cujus contrarii memoria non existit* to signal that the claim reached back to time immemorial.
---
Common Confusion
The Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) entry associated with this term in the source material appears to describe the doctrine of election of remedies and the writ of right — a passage that belongs to a different entry and was misattributed or editorially misplaced. Researchers should not treat that Black's passage as part of the definition of *a tempore*. The substance of *a tempore* is prescription and time immemorial, not the hierarchy of writs or election of remedies.
---
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of *a tempore* in historical sources is almost entirely confined to prescriptive pleading. Researchers working in property law, easements, manorial custom, or franchise claims in older common law materials will encounter the full Latin formula — sometimes abbreviated — as the standard marker that a prescriptive title is being asserted rather than a title by grant or by limitation statute.
Two traps are worth flagging. First, the phrase is sometimes shortened in older reports and registers to *a tempore* alone, with the remainder of the formula implied. Readers unfamiliar with the full construction may miss that a prescriptive claim is being made. Second, the concept of time immemorial in English common law was eventually fixed by statute at 1189 (the first year of Richard I's reign), but the prescriptive formula in pleading continued to use the *a tempore* language long after that statutory anchor was established. The formula therefore outlived its literal meaning in practice: courts recognized that no witness could actually attest to conditions in 1189, and the phrase became a pleading convention rather than a genuine evidentiary standard.
Researchers in American sources will find *a tempore* less frequently. American prescription doctrine generally relies on statutory limitations periods rather than the common law time-immemorial formula, so the phrase appears mainly in early cases that explicitly imported English common law pleading forms or in scholarly treatments of prescriptive easements tracing their English roots.
The term also appears in register and writ literature. Burrill's citation to *Reg. Orig. 46a* and *1 Leon. 273* points researchers toward the Registrum Omnium Brevium and Leonard's reports — the kinds of sources where prescriptive formulas appear in their natural habitat.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is accurate and sufficient: it identifies the phrase, provides the full Latin formula, gives its meaning, and anchors it in prescriptive pleading with two period sources. The entry is brief because the term is technical and narrow — there is little to elaborate. The Black's (2nd Ed.) entry as reproduced in the source material is not genuinely about *a tempore*; it describes the writ of right and election of remedies, which are unrelated doctrines. This appears to be a pagination or compilation error in the source rather than a substantive definition. Researchers relying on the Black's entry as presented should disregard its content for purposes of understanding this term.
Neither dictionary addresses the statutory fixation of time immemorial at 1189, the decline of the formula in American courts, or the distinction between prescriptive rights at common law and rights under limitation statutes — gaps that matter for researchers moving between English and American historical sources.
---