Definition
"And letters of administration" is a truncated phrase appearing in historical legal sources as the tail end of a longer heading or entry — specifically, the continuation of a topic treating the revocation or challenge of probate grants, including both letters testamentary and letters of administration. The phrase signals that whatever rule or procedure has just been stated for one type of grant applies equally to the other.
Letters of administration are the formal instrument issued by a probate or surrogate court authorizing a named person (the administrator) to manage and settle the estate of a person who died intestate (without a valid will), or in cases where an executor named in a will is unable or unwilling to serve. The letters confer legal authority on the administrator to collect assets, pay debts, and distribute the estate to rightful heirs under the supervision of the court.
The compound phrase "and letters of administration" thus typically appears in older treatises and digests in tandem with "letters testamentary," signaling that a stated rule — most commonly one governing revocation or appeal of a grant — applies to both types of probate authority.
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Common Confusion
This entry as it appears in Rapalje & Lawrence is a fragment, not a self-contained term. It is the continuation of a heading that begins with a prior entry — likely "Revocation of Probate" or "Letters Testamentary" — and the reader must locate the preceding entry to recover the full rule being stated. Researchers who encounter this entry in isolation may mistakenly treat it as a standalone definition of letters of administration generally. It is not. The substantive content here concerns the means by which probate grants (including letters of administration) may be challenged or revoked, not the nature of the letters themselves.
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Why It Matters in Research
The fragment structure of this entry is a characteristic hazard of nineteenth-century legal dictionaries. Rapalje & Lawrence, like many contemporaries, organized entries alphabetically but carried headings across multiple consecutive entries, producing orphaned continuations that are opaque without their predecessors. When researchers encounter "And letters of adminis-" (note the mid-word hyphenation common in older print) as a standalone entry, they should immediately search for the preceding alphabetical entry, which will contain the governing rule.
The substantive point the entry preserves — that revocation of probate grants proceeds in two ways, by direct action or by appeal to a higher tribunal — reflects English ecclesiastical court practice that governed probate jurisdiction in England prior to the Probate Act 1857, which transferred probate jurisdiction to civil courts. American researchers should be alert to the fact that treatises citing Williams on Executors (the "1 Wms. Ex." reference in the source) draw on English ecclesiastical court doctrine, which was not uniformly received in American jurisdictions. Colonial and early American courts adapted rather than wholesale adopted these procedures, and state probate statutes varied significantly by the mid-nineteenth century.
The citation to 1 Williams on Executors (7th edition) at page 571 refers to the standard English treatise on the law of executors and administrators, a work that went through multiple editions across the nineteenth century and was widely cited in both English and American courts. Researchers using this citation should confirm which edition of Williams is being consulted, as pagination and content shifted across editions.
For corpus researchers: entries of this fragment type in Law Mind historical dictionary sources serve best as pointers to the fuller treatment in adjacent entries and in the treatise literature, rather than as self-contained authority.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is purely a continuation marker with a single substantive proposition: revocation of probate (including letters of administration) is accomplished either (1) by a direct action brought for that purpose, or (2) by appeal to a higher tribunal to reverse the sentence by which the grant was made. The citation to Williams on Executors at page 571 anchors this in the dominant English authority of the period.
No competing or divergent statement appears in the available historical dictionary sources, as the entry appears only in Rapalje & Lawrence. The entry's brevity reflects its role as a cross-topic connector rather than an independent definition.
What historical sources do not address: the procedural specifics of how American states implemented these two revocation pathways vary considerably, and the ecclesiastical framework underlying Williams on Executors became increasingly inapplicable in American jurisdictions as civil probate courts were established throughout the nineteenth century.
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Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, jurisdiction over letters of administration is exclusively a matter of state law. All states have statutory probate codes that govern the issuance, scope, and revocation of letters of administration, and these codes differ in their procedures, priority rules for administrator appointment, and grounds for revocation. The English ecclesiastical court framework referenced in Williams on Executors has no direct modern American application.
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