BARATRIAM COMMITTIT - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

BARATRIAM COMMITTITAuthored

The Law Mind • 706 words

Definition

A Latin maxim meaning, literally, "he commits barratry." The phrase describes the act of a ship's master or mariner who, through fraud, embezzlement, or willful misconduct, causes loss or damage to the vessel's owner or cargo. In its broader historical usage, the phrase also extended to the terrestrial offense of barratry — the persistent incitement of litigation or quarrels — framing the wrongdoer not merely as someone who has committed a discrete act but as one who bears the character of a barrator. The phrase functions in legal writing less as a standalone term of art and more as a declaratory formula: a shorthand for identifying the commission of barratry in pleading, indictment, or legal argument.

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Common Confusion

BARATRIAM COMMITTIT should not be read as a definition of barratry itself, but as a legal formula asserting its commission. Writers occasionally treat the phrase as synonymous with the substantive offense; it is more precisely the allegation or conclusion — the equivalent of saying "he is guilty of barratry" — rather than a description of what barratry consists of. Researchers encountering this phrase in historical pleadings should look to the surrounding instrument for the substantive elements of the charge. See also BARRATRY for the underlying offense in both its maritime and common-law forms.

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Why It Matters in Research

This phrase appears almost exclusively in historical legal documents — pleadings, indictments, treatises on maritime law, and abridgments — where Latin maxims and formulaic phrases carried structural weight in drafting. Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century English common law sources, admiralty records, or early American maritime pleadings may encounter it as a charging formula. Because the phrase packages a legal conclusion rather than stating facts, it is a signal to look elsewhere in the document for the underlying factual allegations.

The source material available in the Law Mind corpus for this phrase is narrow: Black's 2nd edition provides only fragmentary context, and the phrase does not appear as a developed entry with independent treatment in most historical dictionaries. Researchers should treat corpus hits for this phrase as pointers toward the broader barratry entry cluster rather than as self-contained doctrine.

One notable research trap: the word "baratry" and its variants were spelled inconsistently across centuries — baratry, barratry, baratriam — and search queries should account for all variants when working in full-text historical sources.

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Historical Dictionary Support

Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides only a fragmentary entry for this phrase in the available source material, and the surviving text is incomplete. The phrase does not receive extended independent treatment in most historical legal dictionaries; it is instead absorbed into broader entries on BARRATRY. Termes de la Ley, Cowell's Interpreter, and Bouvier's Law Dictionary all address barratry as a substantive offense but do not isolate the Latin formula as a separate entry, which is consistent with its function as a pleading formula rather than a doctrine. Historical sources generally agree that the maritime form of barratry — the master's fraud against the shipowner — was the more legally developed of the two meanings by the time English-language dictionaries began systematizing legal vocabulary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The terrestrial form (incitement of suits) appears earlier in the common law but received less sustained doctrinal attention in the dictionary tradition.

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Jurisdictional Note

The maritime meaning of barratry, to which this phrase most commonly attaches, was developed primarily in English admiralty courts and was later codified in American maritime law. The terrestrial offense of barratry — inciting litigation — was recognized at common law in England and adopted in varying degrees by American states, though many states eventually abolished or rarely prosecuted it. Researchers working in civil law or continental sources should note that the concept of barratry does not map cleanly onto analogous civil law offenses.

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BARATRIAM COMMITTITmain

Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) • 1910

risters and every member of the public must stand. Solicitors, being officers of the court, are admitted within it; as are also queen’s counsel, barristers with patents of precedence, Parties who appear in person also are placed within the bar on the floor of the court. 2. The term also designates a particular part of the court-room; for example, the place where prisoners stand at thelr trial, _whence the expression “prisoner at the bar.” 3. It further denotes the presence, actual or constructive, of the court. Thus, a trial at bar is one had before the full court, distinguished from a trial had before a single judge at nist prius. So the “case at bar” is the case now before the court and under its consideration ; the case being tried or argued. 4. In the practice of legislative bodies, the bar is the outer boundary of the house, and therefore all persons, not being members, who wisb to address the house, or are summoned to it, appear at the bar for that purpose. 5. In another sense, the whole body of attorneys and counsellors, or the members of the legal profession, collectively, are figuratively called the “bar,” from the place which they usually occupy in court. ‘They are thus distinguished from the “bench,” which term denotes the whole body of judges. 6. In the law of contracts, “bar” means an impediment, an obstacle, or preventive barrier. Thus, relationship within the prohibited degrees is a bar to marriage. In this sense also we speak of the “bar of the statute of limitations.” 7. It further means that which defeats, annuls, cuts off, or puts an end to. Thus, a provision “in bar of dower” is one which has the effect of defeating or cutting off the dower-rights which the wife would otherwise become entitled to in the particular land. 8. In pleading, it denoted a special plea, constituting a sufficient answer to an action at law; and so called because it barred, i. e., prevented, the plaintiff from further prosecuting it with effect, and, if established by proof, defeated and destroyed the action altoNow called a special “plea in bar.” See PLEA IN Bak.