Definition
A Latin phrase from old maritime law meaning "a turning away of peril" or "an averting of danger." The term was used as a descriptive name for the contract of insurance (also called *assecuratio*), reflecting the essential nature of that contract: one party — the insurer — undertakes to bear or avert the peril that threatens the other party, particularly perils of the sea. The phrase captures the functional logic of insurance as a mechanism for transferring risk from the insured to the insurer.
Why It Matters in Research
AVERSIO PERICULI is a term of historical and doctrinal significance rather than operative legal vocabulary. Researchers will not encounter it in modern insurance statutes, regulations, or case law. Its value lies in tracing the conceptual origins of insurance contract theory, particularly in the maritime law tradition that predates modern commercial insurance codes.
The term appears in early European maritime jurisprudence and civil law treatises, not in common law sources. Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century maritime law materials — particularly Dutch and Continental sources — will find it more frequently than those working in English common law records. When encountered in historical sources, it signals that the author is working within the civil law tradition of maritime insurance, where Latin technical vocabulary remained in use well into the eighteenth century.
The reference in Kent's *Commentaries* (3 Kent, Comm. 263) provides a bridge into American legal literature. Chancellor Kent's treatment of insurance law drew heavily on Continental sources, making that passage one of the few points where this phrase surfaces in widely-cited American legal scholarship. Researchers using Law Mind corpus materials on early American insurance law should treat the Kent citation as a gateway to the Continental treatises underlying the doctrine.
The Emerigon connection noted in Burrill is significant. Balthazard-Marie Emerigon's *Traité des Assurances* (1783) is a foundational text in maritime insurance law, and his interpretation of AVERSIO PERICULI — that the insurer "charges himself with" the peril — reflects a substantive reading of the insurer's obligation, not merely a descriptive label. This interpretive nuance matters for researchers examining the historical scope of the insurer's duty and how early courts understood the risk-transfer mechanism.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's entries agree on the core meaning — a turning away of peril, used as a name for the insurance contract — but Burrill offers substantially more depth. Burrill traces the term to specific Continental sources (Loccenius, Stypmannus) and introduces Emerigon's interpretive gloss, indicating that the phrase carried substantive legal weight in civil law maritime scholarship, not merely ornamental Latin. Black's brief entry, citing only Kent, reflects the term's limited penetration into American common law vocabulary.
Both dictionaries treat the term as historical and descriptive rather than operative. Neither presents it as part of a legal test or statutory definition. The apparent truncation of Burrill's entry at "Emerigon the words signify that the insurer charges himself with, and ta—" suggests the original source passage continued with language about the insurer taking the peril upon himself — consistent with the risk-transfer rationale that defines insurance as a contract.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the term's relationship to parallel doctrinal vocabulary in English maritime law, where the same contract was developed under different terminology without the Latin nomenclature. Researchers should not assume that the absence of AVERSIO PERICULI in English common law sources indicates a different doctrine — the underlying contract is the same; the vocabulary reflects different legal traditions.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to Continental civil law maritime tradition and has no operative presence in modern American, English, or Commonwealth insurance law. It may appear in comparative law scholarship or in historical analyses of insurance doctrine drawn from Dutch, French, or Italian maritime sources.