Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "for gain or loss," or equivalently "to lose and gain." In historical English legal practice, these were emphatic words of authorization appearing in old warrants of attorney, signifying that the attorney was fully empowered to act on the principal's behalf — to win or to lose — with the outcome binding on the party granting the warrant. The phrase expressed the totality of the delegation: the attorney was not merely authorized to pursue a favorable result but was clothed with full authority to bind the principal regardless of whether the litigation succeeded or failed.
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Common Confusion
The phrase should not be read as a description of a wager or a contingent arrangement. Its force was not to say the outcome was uncertain, but to confirm that the principal accepted any outcome. It was a term of completeness in the grant of authority, not a term of risk allocation. Researchers encountering it may also see the vernacular English rendering "to lose and gain" used interchangeably in the same instruments.
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Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears almost exclusively in pre-modern procedural instruments — principally warrants of attorney from the period when formal appointment of legal representatives required ritualized language. Researchers working in early English common law records, plea rolls, or chancery materials should recognize it as a marker of a fully executed warrant of attorney rather than a substantive legal standard.
Two traps appear in historical sources. First, the phrase is sometimes silently omitted or paraphrased in later transcriptions and digests, which can obscure whether a warrant was general or limited in scope. Second, because the phrase served an emphatic rather than operative function — its presence reinforced rather than created the authority — its absence from a warrant does not necessarily mean the authority was restricted. Courts of the period, however, treated its inclusion as a signal of full, unconditional delegation.
The phrase is of limited relevance to modern practice, where warrants of attorney in the classical form have been largely replaced by statutory powers of attorney, retainer agreements, and rules of civil procedure governing representation. Researchers encountering the term will most likely be working in legal history, the history of civil procedure, or early property and litigation records.
The citation in Black's to *Reg. Orig. 21 et seq.* refers to the *Registrum Omnium Brevium* (Register of Writs), a foundational source for the forms of action in early English practice. The reference to *Plowd. 201* points to Edmund Plowden's *Commentaries*, a sixteenth-century compilation of case reports regarded as authoritative on procedural and substantive points of the common law. Both sources situate this phrase squarely in the procedural formalism of medieval and early modern English practice.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only entry among Law Mind's shelf sources, defining the phrase as "for gain or loss" and noting it as emphatic language in old warrants of attorney. Black's confirms the vernacular equivalent "to lose and gain" and cites the *Registrum Omnium Brevium* and Plowden's *Commentaries* as authorities.
No other Law Mind shelf dictionaries carry a dedicated entry for this phrase, which reflects its status as a term of art confined to a specific and archaic procedural context. The Black's entry is characteristically brief even for a supplemental gloss, suggesting the editors treated it as a phrase requiring identification rather than extended analysis. Researchers should not expect substantive doctrinal elaboration from historical dictionary sources on this term; the phrase's significance is procedural and formal rather than conceptual.
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