Definition
In Roman civil law, *avla* (also rendered *avia*) denotes a grandmother — specifically, the paternal or maternal grandmother of a deceased person, as recognized within the Roman scheme of intestate succession. The term is a Latin word of relation used in the Institutes and related civil law texts to identify a person's position in the order of heirs entitled to inherit in the absence of a will.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *avla* will almost exclusively find it in texts dealing with Roman civil law and its reception into continental legal systems — not in common law materials. Its primary doctrinal home is the law of intestate succession as organized by Justinian's Institutes, where the gradations of kinship determined the order of inheritance among surviving relatives.
The term is narrow in scope and function: it marks a specific generational and relational position in a family tree as civil law understood it. Researchers working in jurisdictions with a civil law heritage — Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland, mixed systems in South Africa or Latin America — may encounter equivalent concepts under different terminology, but *avla* itself will not appear in modern statutes or case law. It is a term of art belonging to the historical source layer of civil law scholarship.
Traps for the unwary: Black's 2nd Edition Supplemental entry is sparse, and researchers may be tempted to treat *avla* as interchangeable with *avia*, the more commonly attested classical Latin form. The two appear to refer to the same relationship, but the spelling variant *avla* may reflect medieval manuscript transmission rather than classical orthography. When working with primary sources — manuscript Institutes, early printed civil law commentaries, or glossators — expect both spellings.
The cross-reference to *Inst. 3, 6, 3* points to Justinian's Institutes, Book III, Title 6, Section 3, which addresses the rules of intestate succession among cognates. Researchers tracing the genealogy of inheritance rules in civil law jurisdictions should consult that passage directly alongside the Digest titles on succession.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's 2nd Edition Supplemental provides the entirety of the English-language legal dictionary record on this term: a single-sentence entry identifying *avla* as "a grandmother" in civil law, with a citation to Justinian's Institutes (3, 6, 3). No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to extend or contest this definition. The entry's brevity is appropriate to the term's function — it is a relational label, not a legal doctrine.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is how the civil law's precise relational vocabulary — distinguishing *avus* (grandfather), *avia*/*avla* (grandmother), *proavus* (great-grandfather), and so on — structured the practical operation of intestate succession rules. Researchers needing that context must go beyond the dictionary entry to the civil law texts themselves and to treatises on Roman inheritance law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Intestate Succession (Civil Law); Roman Law of Persons and Family Relations.