Definition
Auter vie (also spelled autre vie) is a French law phrase meaning "another's life." In property law, it describes the measuring life used to determine the duration of a particular kind of life estate — one whose duration is measured not by the life of the person holding the interest, but by the life of a third party.
The term appears most commonly in the phrase pur auter vie, meaning "for another's life." A tenant pur auter vie holds a possessory estate in land for as long as a designated third person — the cestui que vie — remains alive. When that third person dies, the estate ends, regardless of whether the holder of the interest is still living.
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Common Language
This is pure legal terminology with French origins carried intact into English common law. There is no meaningful ordinary-English usage to contrast against the legal meaning. The phrase has no entry in modern general dictionaries and would not be encountered outside legal or historical property law contexts. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
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Common Confusion
AUTER VIE vs. ORDINARY LIFE ESTATE: The more familiar life estate is measured by the life of the grantee — the person who holds the interest. An auter vie estate is measured by someone else's life entirely. A researcher encountering "life estate" in historical sources should not assume the measuring life is the holder's own; older conveyancing documents frequently created pur auter vie arrangements, particularly in family settlements and dower contexts.
AUTER VIE vs. CESTUI QUE VIE: These terms work in tandem but refer to different parties. The cestui que vie is the person whose life is the measuring stick. The tenant pur auter vie is the person who actually holds and enjoys the estate during that period. Conflating them produces misreadings of historical deeds and pleadings.
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Why It Matters in Research
Auter vie estates surface throughout historical land records, equity pleadings, and treatise discussions of future interests — and they present specific traps for researchers.
First, duration and alienability questions: because the measuring life belongs to someone other than the holder, a tenant pur auter vie could die while the cestui que vie remained alive. Early common law treated this as creating a gap in possession — a problem that generated considerable doctrine around "occupancy," the right of whoever first entered the land after the tenant's death to hold it until the cestui que vie also died. Later legislation in England (the Statute of Frauds and subsequent acts) addressed this gap, so the applicable rule depends entirely on the time period of the document under examination.
Second, terminological variation: historical sources spell and hyphenate this term inconsistently. Researchers will encounter "auter vie," "autre vie," "pur autre vie," "pur auter vie," and occasional anglicizations like "for another's life" or "during the life of [named person]." A full-text search that uses only one spelling will miss significant material.
Third, the phrase appears in close proximity to terms like dower, curtesy, and various feudal tenure incidents in both English and American historical sources. In early American property law, pur auter vie estates were used in conveyances designed to avoid intestacy complications or to structure family settlements, so they appear in probate and equity records well into the nineteenth century.
Fourth, Blackstone's discussion at 2 Bl. Com. 120 — cited by Bouvier — is the standard reference point for the classical common law treatment. American treatise writers drew from Blackstone directly, so the framework is largely consistent across jurisdictions in the pre-codification era, but researchers should check whether a given state's property statutes modified or abolished the occupancy doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is brief but accurate: "The life of another; a tenant pur auter vie is one holding during or for the life of another," with a citation to Blackstone's Commentaries. This captures the core of the concept without developing the doctrine.
What Bouvier omits is notable for researchers. He does not address the occupancy problem — what happens to the estate when the tenant pur auter vie predeceases the cestui que vie — which is one of the practically significant doctrinal features of this estate type and was treated at length by Blackstone and later by Kent in his Commentaries. Bouvier also does not address the alienability of pur auter vie estates or the rules governing their descent, which differ from ordinary life estates.
The Bouvier entry following "auter vie" begins the definition of AUXILIUM, which was a separate feudal aid concept. Researchers using facsimile or OCR versions of Bouvier should take care that the entries are properly separated, as proximity in alphabetical dictionaries has occasionally led to misreadings in transcribed versions.
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Jurisdictional Note
The pur auter vie estate is a common law concept recognized wherever English property law took root. In American jurisdictions, the core concept survived reception of the common law, but the occupancy doctrine was modified or abolished in many states by statute. Modern property codes in some jurisdictions subsume pur auter vie estates within general life estate treatment, making the classical terminology largely obsolete in current drafting while remaining essential for interpreting historical instruments.
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