Definition
A phrase of limitation and direction appearing in land grants, warrants, and survey instructions, signaling that the described extension of a boundary, line, or entry shall proceed to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, rule, or custom — but no further. The phrase does not itself define that maximum; it incorporates by reference whatever external legal constraint governs the particular type of conveyance or survey at issue.
Most commonly encountered in early American land law, particularly in the context of treasury warrants and entry certificates used in Kentucky, Virginia, and other public land states. When a warrant or entry directed that a tract extend "as far as the law allows" in a given direction, surveyors and courts were required to determine what the governing statutes or land office regulations permitted for that category of entry — typically expressed as a fixed ratio of front to depth, or a maximum acreage in a single direction.
Common Confusion
The phrase is easily misread as mere surplusage or rhetorical filler — as if it simply means "legally." It is not decorative. In the land survey context, "as far as the law allows" is a technical instruction that triggers a specific legal rule about how a tract must be laid out. Courts treating it as vague or indefinite have sometimes reached incorrect conclusions about boundary location. The phrase is also distinct from "to the extent permitted by law" as used in modern contract drafting, which typically functions as a savings clause limiting a provision to avoid illegality rather than as a directional or dimensional instruction.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with early American land records — particularly Kentucky land grants, Virginia military warrants, or similar public land instruments from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — will encounter this phrase in original entries, surveyor's notes, and resulting litigation. Its meaning is entirely dependent on the statutory or regulatory framework in force at the time the entry or warrant was issued.
The Bouvier entry ties the phrase to a specific procedural rule: when an entry directed extension "as far as the law allows" and also called for extending back for quantity, the tract was required to be surveyed three times as long as wide. This 3:1 ratio rule was a real feature of early Kentucky land law, rooted in Virginia land office practice. Researchers should not assume this ratio applies universally — it was jurisdiction-specific and period-specific.
In litigation over title, the phrase has generated disputes about whether a survey properly followed the entry's instructions. If the surveyor failed to apply the correct legal maximum — or applied a different ratio — the patent or grant could be subject to challenge. Courts examining these questions were often reconstructing what "the law" allowed at the moment of the original entry, which may predate the court's own sitting by decades.
Corpus researchers will find this phrase primarily in:
- Early Kentucky and Virginia land case reporters
- Surveyor's field notes and patent files in state archives
- Land law treatises of the early nineteenth century
- Digest entries under "entry," "warrant," "survey," and "boundaries"
Be alert to the fact that later encyclopedias and digests largely dropped this phrase because its relevance collapsed as the public land system matured and the old warrant/entry system was replaced by more regularized federal and state survey methods. Its near-total absence from twentieth-century sources is not evidence that it was unimportant — it is evidence that the legal context that gave it meaning had become historically closed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only dedicated entry among standard historical legal dictionaries. The entry is brief but precise: it connects the phrase to a specific survey rule — three times as long as wide — and cites Kentucky authority (Hughes (Ky.) 176) as the source. This citation appears to reference early Kentucky reports, consistent with the period when Kentucky's land system was still working through the inherited chaos of Virginia military and treasury warrants.
No corresponding entry appears in Black's Law Dictionary (early editions) or Burrill's Law Dictionary, which suggests the phrase was treated as too jurisdiction-specific or too contextually dependent to warrant a standalone definition in general-purpose works. This is a gap researchers should note: the absence of coverage in those sources does not mean the phrase was legally trivial, only that it was a term of art in a narrower regional practice.
Modern legal dictionaries do not carry the phrase at all, reflecting the obsolescence of the warrant-and-entry system it served.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is primarily documented in Kentucky and Virginia land law, where the warrant and entry system created the conditions for its use. Other states with similar early land systems — Tennessee, Ohio, the Carolinas — may have used comparable language under different governing rules. Researchers should not import the Kentucky 3:1 ratio rule into other jurisdictions without independent verification of local land law.