Definition
A civil law easement entitling the owner of a house surrounded by other buildings to discharge waste water or rainwater onto adjacent rooftops or yards. The right is essentially a servitude — a burden imposed on neighboring property — permitting the drainage of water that cannot otherwise escape due to the enclosed position of the dominant property. The term is Latin, meaning roughly "for sending forth water."
In practical operation, the easement resembles the common law doctrine of drip: the right of a building owner to allow rainwater falling from the eaves to drip onto adjoining land. The civil law formulation, however, is broader in some treatments, encompassing waste water discharge generally rather than purely natural precipitation runoff.
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Common Confusion
AQUÆ IMMITTENDÆ is frequently grouped with, or loosely equated to, the common law easement of drip (or "eavesdrop"), but the two are not identical. The common law drip easement concerns natural water falling from eaves onto a neighbor's land — it is passive and incidental to the structure of a building. AQUÆ IMMITTENDÆ, as a civil law servitude, is an affirmative right to direct or cast water outward, including waste water, and must be established as an express or prescriptive servitude. A researcher conflating the two may reach incorrect conclusions about the scope of the right, how it is acquired, and what uses it permits.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in older American and English legal sources that drew on Roman and civil law authorities when developing water-related property doctrine. Its presence in a historical document — a deed, a pleading, or a treatise — signals that the drafter was working within a civil law framework or drawing on civilian learning rather than purely common law tradition.
**Corpus traps.** The term is rendered inconsistently across historical sources due to the difficulties of typesetting Latin ligatures and special characters (æ). Researchers searching historical databases may encounter "aquae immittendae," "aquæ immittendæ," "aquz immittendz," or garbled OCR variants. Running searches on all likely variant spellings is essential. Black's 2nd Edition itself appears with a truncated or corrupted rendering in some digitized versions.
**Jurisdictional relevance in the corpus.** The term surfaces most often in New York and Louisiana materials, and occasionally in cases from states with civil law heritage. In Louisiana, servitude doctrine has continuous civilian roots; in New York, the term appears in mid-nineteenth-century property litigation where courts occasionally reached to Roman law concepts to resolve drainage disputes not cleanly governed by common law rules.
**Limited doctrinal life.** After the mid-nineteenth century, American courts increasingly resolved drainage and water discharge disputes through statutory frameworks, nuisance doctrine, or the common law of easements without invoking the civil law terminology. Finding this term in a post-1900 source would be unusual and worth examining closely for the authority being relied upon.
**Connection to related servitudes.** Researchers encountering AQUÆ IMMITTENDÆ will typically need to examine the related civil law water servitudes — AQUAGIUM (the right to conduct water across land) and STILLICIDIUM (the right of eave drip) — to understand the full doctrinal context. These terms often appear in proximity in both the historical dictionaries and the cases that invoke civilian learning.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the primary definition in the Law Mind corpus, describing the right concisely as a civil law easement to "cast waste water upon the adjacent roofs or yards" belonging to properties surrounding an enclosed house. Black's ties it to the common law easement of drip by analogy — a useful cross-reference for practitioners more familiar with common law categories.
The Black's entry cites *Bellows v. Sackett*, a New York case from the Barbour reports, as illustrative authority. This case is characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century American litigation in which courts drew on civil law terminology when resolving property disputes involving drainage and neighboring structures, particularly in urban contexts where buildings were closely built.
Historical sources generally do not treat AQUÆ IMMITTENDÆ with any depth beyond this brief definitional treatment. It is a narrow, specialized term of art from the Roman law of servitudes that entered American legal vocabulary through civilian-influenced treatises and was never fully domesticated into common law doctrine. Researchers should not expect to find developed common law case law under this heading; the doctrine, where applied, tends to appear under the common law categories of easement, nuisance, or drip rather than the Latin label.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term has the most practical relevance in Louisiana, where civil law servitude doctrine governs, and in historical New York materials, where civilian learning occasionally influenced nineteenth-century property decisions. In most common law jurisdictions, the equivalent right — if recognized at all — would be analyzed under the easement of drip or natural water flow doctrine rather than under this civil law heading.
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