Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "civilly" — that is, by civil process or in a civil capacity, as distinguished from criminal procedure. In legal usage, civiliter describes liability, action, or accountability that arises through civil law rather than criminal law. When a party acts unlawfully and causes injury to another, that party may be answerable civiliter (civilly) regardless of intent; criminal liability (criminaliter) additionally requires a culpable mental state.
The term appears most often as a term of contrast: civiliter versus criminaliter. It signals that the legal consequence under discussion belongs to the civil, not penal, side of the law.
Civiliter also appears in the compound phrase CIVILITER MORTUUS ("civilly dead"), describing a person who, though biologically alive, has been stripped of civil rights and legal personality — historically applicable to those convicted of serious felonies, those who entered certain religious orders, or those banished.
Common Confusion
Civiliter is frequently paired with, and defined against, CRIMINALITER. The two terms are not opposites in the sense of excluding each other: the same wrongful act can give rise to both civil liability (civiliter) and criminal prosecution (criminaliter). The distinction is procedural and remedial, not factual. Researchers conflating the two may misread historical pleadings or treatise passages that use one term to mean only that a particular proceeding is of that character — not that the other avenue is unavailable.
CIVILITER MORTUUS should not be confused with natural death or with legal incompetency. Civil death extinguishes legal personality for specific purposes (ownership of property, capacity to sue, rights of inheritance) but does not affect physical existence or, in most historical treatments, criminal responsibility.
Why It Matters in Research
Civiliter is a term of art drawn directly from Roman and civilian sources and introduced into English common law through the medieval jurists, most prominently Bracton. Because it appears in Latin in older English and American legal texts, researchers encountering it in historical pleadings, treatises, or equity proceedings must recognize it as a procedural and remedial marker rather than a substantive legal standard.
The civil/criminal distinction marked by civiliter versus criminaliter carries real consequences for reading historical sources. In older treatises and digests, an author stating that a defendant is liable civiliter may be explicitly reserving or disclaiming the question of criminal culpability — or may be noting that intent is not required for the civil remedy. The actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea maxim (an act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is also guilty) appears in Bouvier's entry precisely to explain why the civil standard diverges: civiliter liability may attach without the mental element that criminaliter liability demands.
For researchers tracing the history of CIVIL DEATH (civiliter mortuus), this term is the gateway. The concept was significant in early American law — some states carried civil death statutes well into the twentieth century — and the Latin compound appears in constitutional and habeas corpus litigation long after the underlying doctrine had been modified or abolished in many jurisdictions.
Researchers using Burrill should note that his entry quotes Bracton directly, situating the term within the civilian tradition and providing the Latin formulation that recurs in English common law authorities. That lineage matters when the question is whether a particular English or colonial rule derives from civilian or indigenous common law sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core meaning. All treat civiliter as the adverb marking civil (as opposed to criminal) procedure or liability. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's present largely parallel definitions emphasizing the contrast with criminaliter. Burrill adds the most historical depth, tracing the term to Roman civil law and attributing its introduction into English law to Bracton — a provenance the other sources do not discuss.
Bouvier's is the most analytically useful entry for the substantive point: he explains that civil liability attaches whether or not the wrongdoer intended the injury, and uses the entry to illustrate the mens rea distinction. This is not merely a definition but a statement of doctrine, and researchers should read it as such.
Black's (2nd Ed.) is the only source to define CIVILITER MORTUUS in any detail, explaining it as a condition of civil death in which a person is "accounted dead in the view of the law." The 1st edition entry is functionally identical but less developed on this subterm. None of the historical dictionaries provides a systematic account of which legal consequences civil death produced or how the doctrine varied across American states — researchers will need to move beyond the dictionary shelf for that analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase civiliter mortuus and the doctrine of civil death it describes varied significantly across American jurisdictions. Some states codified civil death by statute; others recognized it only in equity or not at all. By the mid-twentieth century, most American jurisdictions had narrowed or abolished broad civil death, though consequences for convicted felons (loss of voting rights, certain property disabilities) persist in modified statutory form in many states.