Definition
Commendare is a Latin term from the civil law meaning to commend, recommend, or entrust. It appears in two distinct legal contexts in Roman law sources:
1. To recommend a person. In this sense, commendare describes the act of formally vouching for an individual to a third party, typically by letter (litterae commendaticiae — a letter of recommendation). The Digest addresses scenarios in which one party asks another to write such a letter, raising questions about the legal weight and liability, if any, attached to the recommendation.
2. To commend or praise a thing offered for sale. In commercial contexts, commendare describes a seller's act of speaking favorably of goods — what today would be called sales puffery. Roman jurists drew a distinction between actionable misrepresentation and mere commendation: a seller who praises his wares (quod venditur ut commendet dicit) does not thereby warrant their quality in the same manner as one who makes a specific factual representation.
Common Confusion
Commendare must be distinguished from COMMENDAM (also COMMANDAM or IN COMMENDAM), a separate legal institution in which a church benefice is held temporarily by a person not in holy orders, or in which a business is organized with a silent investor bearing limited liability. Despite sharing a Latin root and the notion of "entrusting," commendam developed into a fully distinct legal concept with its own extensive body of canon law and, later, commercial law doctrine. The two terms overlap in etymology only, not in legal operation. Researchers who encounter commendare in a commercial or partnership context should verify whether the source is actually discussing commendam.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering commendare in historical legal sources should be alert to which of the two senses is operative. The commercial sense — seller's puffery versus warranted representation — connects directly to the Roman law roots of modern warranty doctrine and the common law distinction between mere opinion and actionable misrepresentation. Tracing that distinction through civil law sources often requires identifying where Roman jurists drew the line between commendatio (permissible praise) and dolus malus (fraudulent misstatement).
The personal recommendation sense is less frequently litigated but appears in Digest passages addressing liability for false or misleading letters of introduction. Researchers working in the law of agency, mandate, or suretyship should note that a commendatory letter was generally not treated as a guarantee of the recommended person's conduct — a point the Digest addresses and that later civilian commentators elaborated upon.
For corpus researchers, commendare and its noun form commendatio will appear in glossed Roman law texts, canon law materials (where commendatio of benefices takes on an entirely separate ecclesiastical meaning — see COMMENDAM), and early modern commercial law treatises. The same Latin root generates significantly different legal institutions depending on the context. Do not assume continuity of meaning across these bodies of law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential framework, quoting directly from the Digest (41.1.65 and 47.2.64.4) to illustrate both senses of the term. The entry is compressed but accurate: it captures the bifurcation between recommending persons and praising goods without conflating them.
What Burrill does not address — and what researchers should supply from other sources — is the doctrinal significance of the commercial sense. The Roman distinction between commendatio and warranty is foundational to civilian contract law and surfaces in later treatises on sale. Burrill also does not cross-reference the ecclesiastical institution of commendam, which derives from the same root but developed into a wholly independent body of law governing the temporary holding of church benefices. Historical legal dictionaries that treat only one of these meanings without flagging the others risk sending researchers down the wrong path.
Jurisdictional Note
Commendare as a civil law term has no direct operation in common law jurisdictions, but its commercial sense — the distinction between a seller's puffery and a warranty — migrated into English equity and commercial law through civilian influence and is now embedded in modern warranty doctrine across common law systems.