Definition
A co-heir or joint heir. The term denotes one of two or more persons who inherit together from the same decedent, each taking a proportionate share of the estate. In Roman civil law and its descendants, cohzeres referred to any person who shared equally in an inheritance with one or more others, the estate passing to all cohzeredes collectively before individual shares were carved out.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering cohzeres in historical legal texts — particularly in medieval English records, ecclesiastical court documents, or early common law treatises drawing on civilian sources — should recognize it as a Latinate term that fell out of active use relatively early. By the time English equity practice matured, "co-heir" and "coparcener" had largely displaced the Latin form in practitioner usage. When parsing old pleadings, wills, or inheritance disputes transcribed in Law Mind's historical corpus, cohzeres almost always signals a civil law influence or a source written by someone trained in Roman or canon law traditions. Do not assume the term tracks precisely with the English common law concept of coparcenary, which had its own technical rules distinct from the civilian treatment of joint heirship.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) gives the definition tersely: "a co-heir, or joint heir," noting its origin in Latin civil and old English law. No further development of the term appears in Black's, which is consistent with its status as a learned Latin borrowing rather than a term generating its own body of doctrine. The brevity of the entry reflects the term's role as a straightforward translation vehicle rather than a term of art carrying independent legal weight. Historical dictionaries do not diverge on meaning here — the consensus is uniform, if thin. What the historical sources collectively omit is any discussion of how cohzeres interacted with the English doctrine of coparcenary, or how civilian writers distinguished between cohzeredes who took by universal succession versus those taking specific legacies.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs principally to Roman civil law and the early English legal tradition that borrowed civilian terminology. It has no meaningful modern usage in any common law jurisdiction and does not appear as a term of art in contemporary civil law systems, which use their own vernacular equivalents.