Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "shall have been." Used in older legal instruments, pleadings, and writs to express a future-perfect condition — that is, a state of affairs that will have been completed or established by a specified future point. The phrase functions as a verb form indicating the anticipated completion of an act or status before some subsequent event or date becomes operative.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical English legal records — particularly pre-nineteenth-century writs, pleadings, conveyances, or court rolls — should recognize it as a grammatical marker rather than a term of substantive legal doctrine. Its significance is structural: it signals a conditional or future-perfect construction in the instrument. Misreading the tense can affect interpretation of when rights vested, when duties attached, or when a condition was deemed satisfied. Because Law French was progressively displaced in English legal practice following the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731 (which mandated English in legal proceedings), occurrences of *ara ete* will be concentrated in documents predating that reform or in antiquarian legal literature. Researchers working in Year Books, early Chancery records, or plea rolls are most likely to encounter it. The phrase appears only rarely in American legal materials, and then only in citations to English precedent or early colonial instruments drawing on English forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term, defining it tersely as "Shall have been" and attributing the gloss to Kelham — a reference to Robert Kelham's *Dictionnaire de la Language Franke* (1779), a standard reference for Law French vocabulary. Burrill offers no further substantive commentary, which itself reflects the term's character: it is a grammatical form rather than a legal concept requiring extended definition. No divergence among sources is detectable because no other historical dictionaries in the corpus address it. The absence of the term from Black's and Bouvier's suggests it had fallen from active use well before American legal lexicography consolidated in the nineteenth century.