ADQUIRERE

Definition

A Latin term from the civil law and early English law meaning "to acquire" or "to gain." Adquirere appears in legal maxims and glosses concerning the legal rules governing how possession and ownership of property come into being. The term is a variant spelling of acquirere and functions identically in legal usage. It surfaces primarily in Latinate legal formulas rather than as a standalone operative term.

Common Confusion

Adquirere and acquirere are not meaningfully different terms — they are orthographic variants of the same Latin word. Some researchers unfamiliar with classical Latin orthography (in which ad + qu- sometimes telescopes to ac-) may treat them as separate entries. They are not. Any legal meaning attached to one attaches equally to the other.

Why It Matters in Research

Researchers encounter adquirere almost exclusively in maxim collections, civil law commentaries, and medieval English legal texts such as Fleta. Its practical significance is as a building block in longer Latin propositions about acquisition of possession or title, not as a term of art standing alone. Two maxims associated with adquirere carry substantive legal content worth tracking: 1. Adquiritur possessio — "possession is acquired" — introduces rules in the civil law tradition about the moment and method by which possession legally attaches. Fleta lib. 4, c. 18, § 2 is the immediate source Burrill cites, and researchers working on medieval English property law should consult Fleta directly when this phrase appears in secondary sources. 2. Res corporales animo adquiruntur et corpore, per traditionem — corporeal things are acquired by both intent (animus) and physical act (corpus), through delivery (traditio) — encodes the Roman law doctrine that acquisition of tangible property requires a meeting of mental intention and physical transfer. This dual-element rule (will plus bodily act) is foundational to understanding how the common law later treated delivery in gift and conveyance contexts. Researchers tracing the doctrinal ancestry of delivery requirements in deed or gift law will find this maxim a useful bridge between civil law sources and early common law reasoning. Because adquirere is a variant Latin spelling, keyword searches in digitized historical corpora may miss instances spelled acquirere or acquisitio. Run both spellings when surveying Latin legal texts. Burrill himself directs readers to the acquirere entry, signaling that the two are interchangeable and that the substantive doctrinal discussion sits under the more common spelling.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source covering this term. Burrill treats adquirere as a simple variant of acquirere, offering no substantive doctrinal elaboration beyond the two maxims noted above. The entry's value is indexical — it confirms the spelling variant and points to the Fleta passages. No independent doctrinal weight is assigned to adquirere as distinct from acquirere. Burrill's handling of adquirere is characteristic of nineteenth-century American law dictionaries that preserved Latin civil law vocabulary for the benefit of practitioners encountering older English and ecclesiastical records. The term had no living currency in American courts; its inclusion reflects the dictionary's function as a guide to historical sources rather than current law. Other major historical dictionaries (Jacob's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's) carry acquirere and acquisitio but do not separately index the adquirere spelling. Researchers relying solely on those sources may not find the term under this orthographic variant, making Burrill particularly useful for this entry.

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