Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "for the purpose of being entertained as a guest." The term appears in common law innkeeper doctrine to describe the legal relationship — and the legal capacity — in which a person enters an inn or public house. A traveler who arrives causa hospitandi is there as a proper guest, not merely as a licensee or social visitor, and accordingly stands in a relationship with the innkeeper that triggers the innkeeper's special duties of care and strict liability for loss of the guest's goods.
The distinction matters because common law imposed extraordinary obligations on innkeepers — obligations that did not attach to every person who entered the premises. Only one who came causa hospitandi, and was received in that capacity, enjoyed the full protection of innkeeper liability.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a term of art in innkeeper law, a body of doctrine that is significantly more prominent in historical sources than in modern practice. Researchers working in nineteenth-century English or American case law will encounter it as a threshold question: courts had to determine whether a plaintiff was present causa hospitandi or in some other capacity (as a boarder, a servant, a frequenter of the tavern for food and drink only) before innkeeper liability attached. The capacity in which one entered — and was received — was outcome-determinative.
The phrase also signals a structural feature of common law innkeeper doctrine that is easy to miss in modern sources: the innkeeper's liability for a guest's goods was not in tort in the ordinary sense but was quasi-absolute, analogous to that of a common carrier. That strict liability applied only to the person present causa hospitandi. Courts drew careful lines around this category, and reading older cases requires understanding that the phrase is doing jurisdictional and definitional work, not merely providing color.
Researchers should note that modern hotel and innkeeper statutes in most U.S. jurisdictions have modified or capped the common law strict liability rule, so the phrase itself rarely appears in contemporary litigation. Its natural habitat is nineteenth-century English reports and early American state court decisions. The citation shared by both Black's and Burrill's — 4 Maule & Selwyn 310 — points to English King's Bench authority from the early nineteenth century and is the anchoring precedent for the phrase in both dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement, offering virtually identical definitions: "for the purpose of being entertained as a guest," with the same citation, 4 Maule & Selwyn 310. Neither source elaborates beyond the phrase itself, leaving the doctrinal significance — the strict liability framework it unlocks — to be inferred from surrounding innkeeper law entries.
Burrill's entry is interesting for a reason that has nothing to do with causa hospitandi: the text immediately following in the source runs into the neighboring entry (beginning "CAUSA MATRIMONII PRÆLOCU-"), with interleaved text from a separate definition of causa in the contractual sense ("the consideration of a contract, that is, the inducement to it"). This is a typographical artifact of nineteenth-century legal dictionary production and not a claim that causa hospitandi has anything to do with contract consideration. Researchers encountering the Burrill's source text directly should not be confused by this bleed-through.
Neither dictionary addresses the related question of how courts determined whether a person was received causa hospitandi in fact — a question that generated considerable litigation and turned on whether the innkeeper knew of, and accepted, the guest in that capacity.
Jurisdictional Note
The causa hospitandi framework derives from English common law and was adopted broadly in American jurisdictions. Modern U.S. statutory schemes governing innkeeper liability have largely displaced the phrase in practice, but the common law doctrine — and thus the term — remains relevant in states that have not fully codified the innkeeper-guest relationship, and for any research involving pre-statutory cases.