Definition
Adulterous bastardy is a historical legal classification describing the status of a child born of an adulterous union — that is, born to parents at least one of whom was married to a third person at the time of the child's conception. The term combines two older legal concepts: adultery (sexual relations in violation of a marriage bond) and bastardy (the condition of being born outside lawful wedlock). A child so classified was deemed illegitimate regardless of any subsequent marriage between the biological parents.
Under Louisiana's Civil Code, the definition was codified explicitly: adulterous bastards are those produced by an unlawful connection between two persons who, at the time of conception, were either one or both connected by marriage with some other person. This formulation captured both single-sided adultery (only one parent married to another) and double adultery (both parents married to third parties).
The term describes a status, not a wrong committed by the child. Its legal consequences fell entirely on the child — affecting inheritance rights, legitimation capacity, and claims of parental support — despite the child's complete lack of agency in the circumstances of their birth.
Common Confusion
Adulterous bastardy is a subtype of bastardy generally. Not all illegitimate children were adulterous bastards. A child born to two unmarried persons was illegitimate but not an adulterous bastard. The distinction mattered because adulterous bastards historically faced more severe legal disabilities than ordinary illegitimates. In civil law jurisdictions like Louisiana, adulterous bastards could not be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their parents — a remedy available to other illegitimate children — precisely because that marriage could not have lawfully occurred at the time of conception.
Adulterous bastardy should also be distinguished from incestuous bastardy, a parallel classification applied to children born of unions prohibited by consanguinity or affinity. Both categories occupied the most restricted tier of illegitimacy under civil law systems, but the grounds for exclusion differed.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Simple adulterous bastardy: Only one parent was married to a third person at the time of conception. The adulterous union was one-sided.
Double adulterous bastardy: Both parents were married to third persons at the time of conception. This was the more aggravated form under civil law analysis and carried the most complete bar to legitimation.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a civil law artifact. Researchers encountering it in American materials should expect a Louisiana or French-derived context. Common law jurisdictions did not employ the same taxonomic structure for illegitimacy; they used bastardy as a largely undifferentiated status without formal subcategories based on the nature of the parents' relationship.
The practical research trap is assuming modern illegitimacy doctrine maps onto this historical classification. It does not. Contemporary American law, following constitutional developments from the late twentieth century, substantially dismantled the legal disabilities attached to illegitimacy. Terms like adulterous bastardy have no operative legal meaning in current American jurisprudence. Researchers finding the term in historical Louisiana statutes, succession records, or notarial archives should treat it as a term of art with specific civil law consequences that no longer apply in their modern form.
The inability of adulterous bastards to be legitimated by subsequent parental marriage was a point of consistent civil law doctrine with significant succession consequences. Researchers tracing inheritance disputes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Louisiana records will encounter this classification as a definitive bar to a child's claim as a forced heir or intestate successor.
Corpus connections: entries on legitimation, bastardy, and illegitimacy will provide the surrounding doctrinal framework. Succession law entries are the most relevant downstream context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions reproduce the definition almost verbatim from Civil Code of Louisiana article 182, making clear that this was not a common law term but a statutory civil law classification imported directly into the American legal vocabulary through Louisiana's French and Spanish legal inheritance. Black's does not elaborate beyond the statutory language, which reflects the term's narrow geographic and doctrinal scope.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the consequence side: the rule that adulterous bastards could not be legitimated, the effect on forced heirship calculations, or the distinction between simple and double adultery. Researchers relying solely on Black's entries will have the classification but not the legal stakes that made it matter. Supplementary research in Louisiana civil law commentaries — particularly the work of scholars writing on the Civil Code before its twentieth-century revisions — is necessary to understand how the classification operated in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
This classification was operative in Louisiana under the Civil Code and reflects the civil law tradition. Common law states did not use this taxonomy. Louisiana substantially reformed its illegitimacy statutes in the twentieth century, and constitutional doctrine has since further eroded formal illegitimacy classifications nationwide.