Definition
Cohjeres (Latin) is a civil law and old English law term for a co-heir or joint heir — a person who inherits alongside one or more others from the same decedent. Where a single heir takes the whole of an estate, a cohjeres is one of two or more individuals who together receive the inheritance, each holding an undivided share by virtue of the same title of succession.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, Roman law sources, or early common law treatises will encounter cohjeres as the standard Latin designation for joint heirs. The term appears most naturally in contexts drawn from civil law tradition — Roman and canon law texts, and the English legal writing influenced by both — rather than in post-medieval common law practice, where the vernacular "co-heir" or "joint heir" eventually displaced it.
The practical trap for corpus researchers is terminological drift: a record using cohjeres may be operating under civil law inheritance principles (such as equal division among heirs by default) that differ meaningfully from common law rules (such as primogeniture). Encountering the term in a source is itself a signal about the legal tradition the drafter was drawing from. Do not assume that rights and duties described for a cohjeres map directly onto what a "joint heir" would hold under later English common law.
The term is sparse in the corpus. It is most likely to surface in Latin pleadings, ecclesiastical court records, glosses on Roman law texts, or treatises engaging with civilian inheritance doctrine. If you find cohjeres in an English source, consider whether the document was drafted by someone trained in civil or canon law — a common circumstance in ecclesiastical, admiralty, or early chancery contexts.
Cross-referencing with entries for hereditas, heres, and related civil law succession terms will be important for understanding the doctrinal environment in which cohjeres operates.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the sole direct definition in the Law Mind corpus: "Lat. in civil and old English law. A co-heir, or joint heir." The entry is brief, as befits a term that had largely passed out of active legal use by the time major English-language law dictionaries were compiled. Black's correctly identifies the dual heritage — civil law origin, old English law adoption — without elaborating on the doctrinal consequences of that dual lineage.
No divergence among sources is at issue here, since only one dictionary entry is available. The absence of the term from later or fuller editions of Black's and from other major legal dictionaries reflects its obsolescence rather than any ambiguity about its meaning. Researchers should not expect broader dictionary treatment; the historical record on this term is thin by design.
Jurisdictional Note
Cohjeres is a term of civil law origin and appears in English legal usage only in contexts influenced by Roman or canon law. It has no meaningful presence in modern common law jurisdictions as operative legal vocabulary. Its significance is historical and interpretive, not jurisdictional in the contemporary sense.