Definition
A Law Latin phrase meaning "high and low." As a legal term of art, alto et basso describes a submission agreement in which two disputing parties agree to refer all matters in controversy — without exception — to arbitration. The phrase functions as a term of completeness: a submission alto et basso leaves nothing outside the arbitrator's reach. It covers disputes great and small, significant and minor, high and low.
The term appears most commonly in older English legal writing as a descriptor for the scope of a submission to arbitration, not as a standalone doctrine. It signals that the parties have made a comprehensive, unrestricted reference rather than a limited or subject-matter-specific one.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Alto and basso are musical terms. Alto denotes a voice or instrument in the middle-to-lower range; basso denotes the lowest vocal or instrumental register. Together they suggest the full span from lower to lowest — a narrower, specifically musical sense.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Alto is defined as a high or counter-tenor voice, or the part sung by the highest male voices; basso as a deep or low voice, the bass part in music.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. In music, alto and basso describe adjacent registers, neither representing the full compass of sound. In Law Latin legal usage, alto et basso is an idiomatic expression meaning the complete range of high to low — a rhetorical merism covering everything between two extremes. A researcher encountering the phrase in a legal source should not read it in its musical sense; it is a term of totality, not of register.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical legal sources. Researchers will not encounter alto et basso in modern arbitration agreements, statutes, or judicial opinions — contemporary practice uses plain-English equivalents such as "all disputes arising out of or relating to" or "any and all claims." The phrase is a marker of pre-modern English arbitration practice and of the Law Latin drafting conventions that governed submission agreements before the plain-language era.
When searching the Law Mind corpus, be aware that Burrill's cross-references the phrase to the entry DE ALTO ET BASSO — suggesting that in some historical sources the term appears with the preposition de prefixed. Researchers should search both forms.
The practical research trap: alto et basso does not describe a type of arbitration or a procedural rule. It describes the scope of a submission agreement. A document using this phrase is making a claim about comprehensiveness, not about process, forum, or enforceability. Conflating scope language with procedural terms can lead to misreading historical pleadings and agreements.
Corpus connections: This term links naturally to the history of arbitration submissions, the development of submission agreements under English common law, and the broader category of Law Latin terms of art that survived into early American legal writing before being displaced by statutory modernization.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: alto et basso means "high and low" and describes an agreement to submit all matters in dispute to arbitration. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's reproduce the same formulation almost verbatim, each citing Cowell — a reference to John Cowell's Interpreter (1607), the early English legal glossary that appears to be the common ancestor of this definition across the tradition.
Burrill takes the slightly different approach of cross-referencing DE ALTO ET BASSO rather than defining the term directly, suggesting awareness that the prepositional form was the more technically complete citation in Law Latin usage.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: none of the four sources discuss what consequences followed from a submission characterized as alto et basso — whether courts treated such submissions as more strictly binding, whether the comprehensiveness of scope was enforceable against a party who later sought to carve out a particular dispute, or how arbitrators construed the phrase in practice. Historical dictionary entries on this term are definitional only; they convey meaning but offer no procedural or doctrinal depth.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is rooted in English legal practice and appears primarily in sources tracing to English common law. American legal dictionaries reproduced it by inheritance rather than by active use in U.S. courts or legislation. No significant jurisdictional variation is documented because the term did not generate independent doctrinal development in American jurisdictions.