Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "for studying and praying." In legal usage, the phrase describes the foundational purpose for which colleges and universities are established and chartered — the promotion of learning and religion. It appears in historical legal literature as a characterizing description of educational and religious corporations, distinguishing institutions organized for those purposes from bodies organized for commercial or governmental ends.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears most frequently in historical materials dealing with the legal status of universities and colleges as corporations. Researchers encountering the term in older English and American sources should understand it as a term of classification rather than a term of art with active operative effect — it described what a university was for, not a specific legal rule or doctrine attached to it.
The phrase is primarily a marker of the historical treatment of academic institutions as a distinct category of eleemosynary or charitable corporation. When tracing the early common law foundations of university governance, corporate privileges, or charitable trust doctrine as applied to educational institutions, this phrase signals entry into that body of law. Researchers working in the history of higher education law, charitable corporations, or ecclesiastical influences on common law corporate doctrine will encounter it as a framing device in Blackstone and in cases citing Blackstone.
The phrase does not appear to have survived into modern statutory or case law as a live term. It is essentially a historical descriptor. Researchers should not expect to find it in modern indices or digests; its relevance today is almost entirely confined to historical legal scholarship and to interpreting older sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill — agree precisely on the translation ("for studying and praying") and the application (colleges and universities), and all three cite the same primary sources: Blackstone's Commentaries, Book I, at page 467, and T. Raym. 101 (Sir Thomas Raymond's Reports). The consistency across dictionaries reflects that this phrase was not contested or evolving in legal literature — it was simply a fixed Latin descriptor drawn from Blackstone.
Blackstone's use of the phrase in the Commentaries situates it within his broader discussion of the kinds of corporations recognized by English common law, where he distinguishes bodies politic organized for civil governance from those created for charitable and educational purposes. The Raymond citation connects the phrase to early English case law on the corporate status of universities.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is any doctrinal weight the phrase may have carried — whether, for example, a corporation's description as existing ad studendum et orandum had consequences for its tax treatment, its capacity to hold property, or its privileges and immunities. Researchers who need to answer those downstream questions must look beyond the dictionary entries to Blackstone's surrounding text and to treatises on eleemosynary corporations.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Charitable and Eleemosynary Corporations; Universities and Colleges (Corporate Status)