BRINA

Definition

In Roman civil law, the son or daughter of a great-uncle or great-aunt, whether on the paternal or maternal side. The term designates a specific degree of collateral kinship within the extended family structure recognized under classical Roman law, corresponding roughly to a first cousin once removed in modern genealogical usage, though the Roman classification system for cognatic relatives did not map precisely onto that terminology.

Common Confusion

The two historical dictionary entries for BRINA appear immediately before entries for PROPIOS (or PROPRIOS), a Spanish law term concerning reserved municipal lands in Spanish America. The proximity of these entries in Black's and Burrill's creates a minor risk of editorial confusion when reading dense column-formatted historical sources — the BRINA definition is brief and the PROPIOS entry follows with no blank line in some editions. Researchers should take care to treat these as entirely separate terms.

Why It Matters in Research

BRINA is relevant primarily to research in Roman civil law and its influence on succession, inheritance, and intestate distribution schemes. Roman law categorized collateral relatives with precision because inheritance rights in the absence of a will depended on the degree and line of kinship. The exact degree represented by brina — the child of a parent's uncle or aunt — had direct practical consequences for priority of succession under the Institutes and the Digest. Researchers working with historical sources on civil law succession, particularly those tracing the reception of Roman law into civil law jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, Spanish colonial law, French law), may encounter this term in discussions of collateral inheritance hierarchies. It will not appear in common law sources, which did not adopt Roman kinship nomenclature for intestacy purposes. The term is rare even within civil law dictionaries. Its appearance in both Black's and Burrill's reflects the ambition of those works to cover classical Roman terminology comprehensively, not any frequency of use in American practice. Researchers should treat it as a term of Roman technical art requiring reference back to the Institutes (specifically Inst. 3.6) for full context.

Historical Dictionary Support

Black's (2nd Ed.) and Burrill's agree closely on the definition, both citing the Institutes of Justinian for authority. Black's cites Inst. 3, 6, 3; Burrill cites Inst. 3, 6, 5 — a minor discrepancy in section numbering that likely reflects different edition conventions rather than a substantive disagreement about meaning. Both sources agree on the essential content: the son or daughter of a great-uncle or great-aunt, paternal or maternal. Neither source elaborates on how brina fit within the broader Roman succession scheme or how the term related to adjacent kinship categories such as sobrinus (the child of a parent's first cousin). For a researcher needing that structural context, the Institutes themselves and Gaius's Institutes are the appropriate primary sources; the dictionary entries function only as a quick gloss.

Jurisdictional Note

BRINA is a term of Roman civil law with no independent presence in American common law. It remains potentially relevant in civil law jurisdictions that received Roman law directly — Louisiana being the most prominent American example — but even there, modern codified kinship terminology has displaced classical Roman nomenclature in practice.

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