Definition
In Roman civil law, a collegatarius is a co-legatee — a person who receives a legacy jointly with one or more other persons under the same testamentary disposition. Where a testator leaves a specific bequest to multiple recipients in common, each recipient stands as a collegatarius to the others.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow Latin civil-law term encountered almost exclusively in historical sources, Roman law scholarship, and treatises tracing the foundations of testamentary and succession law. Researchers working in Anglo-American common law sources will rarely encounter it in primary legal materials; its appearance in a document typically signals either a civil law jurisdiction, a scholarly or comparative law text, or a historical source drawing directly on Roman legal categories.
The practical significance of co-legatee status in Roman law centered on questions of share allocation, survivorship among legatees, and the obligations of the heir (heres) to satisfy the bequest — matters governed by rules distinct from common-law joint tenancy or tenancy in common. A researcher encountering collegatarius in a historical context should not assume that the rules governing modern co-beneficiaries under a will apply without further investigation into the governing legal tradition.
The term has no meaningful life in modern Anglo-American case law or statutes. It functions primarily as a technical marker in civil-law-derived systems (Louisiana, Quebec, mixed jurisdictions) and in academic treatments of Roman inheritance. If it appears in a primary source, that source's jurisdictional and doctrinal context requires close attention before drawing analogies to contemporary succession doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on a single, spare definition: a co-legatee in the civil law, citing Justinian's Institutes 2.20.8 as the authoritative source. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill reproduce this citation; Rapalje & Lawrence expand slightly by specifying that the legacy is held "in common with other persons," which usefully gestures toward the shared-interest dimension of the concept.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the legal consequences of collegatarius status — the rights and obligations among co-legatees, the rules governing lapse or survivorship, or the heir's duties of satisfaction — leaving the practitioner or scholar to consult the Institutes directly for operational detail. The uniformity across dictionaries reflects the term's status as settled Latin vocabulary rather than a concept in doctrinal dispute.
What the historical sources collectively omit is any discussion of the term's inapplicability or analogical limits in common-law contexts, which is the most important practical note for English-language legal researchers.
Jurisdictional Note
The term originates in Roman law and carries direct operational significance only in civil-law systems. In mixed jurisdictions such as Louisiana and Quebec, the underlying concept of co-legatee rights retains civil-law character and researchers should consult civil-code provisions on legacies rather than common-law will and trust doctrine.