Definition
Ademptio (Latin) is the civil law term for the revocation or withdrawal of a legacy by the testator. It describes the act by which a testator cancels or takes back a bequest previously made in a will, whether by explicit declaration, by dealing with the bequeathed property in a manner inconsistent with the legacy, or by operation of law. The common law equivalent is ademption.
A specific subtype recognized in Roman sources is translatio: where a legacy was not simply revoked but expressly transferred from one legatee to another. Translatio is thus a directed ademptio rather than a bare cancellation.
Common Confusion
Ademptio and ademption are not separate doctrines — they are the Latin civil law term and its anglicized common law counterpart, respectively. Researchers may encounter either form depending on the era and jurisdiction of their source. In modern American legal writing, ademption is standard; ademptio appears almost exclusively in historical treatises, Roman law scholarship, and older common law works that cite civil law authority. Do not treat them as distinct concepts.
Ademptio should also be distinguished from revocation of a will. Revocation operates on the entire testamentary instrument; ademptio operates on a single legacy within a valid will that otherwise remains in force.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in civil law contexts and in Anglo-American sources that draw on Roman law authority. Researchers working in primary sources from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — particularly in equity, ecclesiastical courts, or jurisdictions with strong civilian influence such as Louisiana or South Carolina — will encounter ademptio where later sources use ademption.
The Institutes and Digest citations in the historical dictionary entries (Inst. 2, 21; Dig. 34, 4) are the foundational Roman law sources. If a historical source cites these titles without explanation, it is invoking the classical civil law framework for legacy revocation. Knowing that the Digest title 34.4 is specifically devoted to ademption of legacies and fideicommissa allows a researcher to locate the underlying authority rather than treat it as an opaque citation.
The translatio distinction is practically useful: some historical disputes turned on whether a testator intended a bare revocation of a legacy or a transfer of that legacy to a different beneficiary, with different consequences for the original legatee and the estate. Sources that use translatio as a term of art are invoking this precise distinction, not simply describing a property transfer.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that modern ademption doctrine — particularly the distinction between ademption by extinction and ademption by satisfaction — developed substantially in equity and was refined through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Older sources using ademptio may not reflect these distinctions, which emerged largely from common law elaboration rather than the civil law baseline.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Burrill's are in full agreement on the core definition, and the uniformity across all three sources reflects that this is a term of settled civil law meaning with little interpretive controversy in the dictionary tradition. All three cite the same Institutes and Digest passages, confirming the Roman law foundation.
Burrill's adds the etymological note — from adimere, to take away, revoke, adeem — which is practically useful because it explains the verbal root behind both ademptio and the English verb to adeem, which appears in probate practice. Black's 2nd edition includes the entry amid material about addition in French law, a formatting artifact of the original that has no substantive significance.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: none of the three sources engages the downstream common law development of ademption doctrine — the equity rules governing when a legacy is adeemed by satisfaction, the treatment of specific versus general legacies, or the modern statutory modifications. Researchers who find ademptio in a historical source and need to understand its common law application must move to treatise and case law sources rather than relying on these dictionary entries alone.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Wills and Testamentary Succession; Legacies and Bequests