Definition
A Latin term from old legal practice meaning to express in words, to frame, or to draw a legal instrument. In its technical sense, *concipere* described the act of formally composing or drafting a legal document — giving legal effect to an intention by committing it to proper written form. The term reflects the Roman law tradition in which the precise verbal formulation of a legal instrument was itself a constitutive act, not merely a record of prior agreement.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To conceive; to form or develop in the mind; to become pregnant.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To receive into the womb; to begin the formation of an embryo; to form an idea or notion; to apprehend or understand.
The gap between ordinary and legal meaning here is instructive. In common usage, *concipere* (and its English derivative "conceive") centers on mental origination — the forming of an idea — or biological conception. The legal usage, by contrast, emphasizes the outward, formal act of reducing that idea to a properly constructed written instrument. The legal meaning is not the conception of a legal intention but its disciplined expression in binding documentary form.
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Why It Matters in Research
*Concipere* is encountered almost exclusively in treatises and practice manuals rooted in Roman law and early English ecclesiastical or admiralty practice. Burrill's single citation — Clerke's *Praxis Curiae Admiralitatis* — locates the term squarely in the admiralty context, where Latin formulary drafting survived longer than in common law courts.
Researchers working in pre-modern admiralty records, ecclesiastical court pleadings, or civilian (civil law) treatises should be alert to the term appearing in discussions of how instruments, libels, or articles were formally drawn. It is less likely to appear as a term of art in common law pleading manuals, where English equivalents (*to draw*, *to frame*) dominated.
The practical research trap is reading *concipere* in a historical source and importing its biological or cognitive connotations from general Latin usage. In a procedural or formulary context, it invariably refers to the drafting act itself, not to any mental state of the drafter.
Because the term belongs to a stratum of legal Latin that largely disappeared from active legal practice by the eighteenth century, it is underrepresented in later English-language dictionaries. Researchers tracing the vocabulary of early admiralty or civil law practice in England will find it in practitioner manuals rather than in reported cases.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources. Burrill is terse but precise: *concipere* means "to conceive; to express in words; to frame or draw a legal instrument," and he situates it in "old practice," signaling that by his era (mid-nineteenth century) the term was already archaic in active legal use. His citation to Clerke's *Praxis Curiae Admiralitatis* (title 6) is the key primary anchor, pointing to one of the foundational English admiralty practice manuals, which was written in Latin and drew heavily on civilian methodology.
No other standard historical dictionaries (Jacob, Tomlin, Black's early editions) appear to carry a dedicated entry, which itself confirms the term's narrow circulation outside the civilian-trained bar. The absence of disagreement across sources reflects the term's specificity rather than consensus — there simply was not enough usage variation to generate competing definitions.
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Jurisdictional Note
*Concipere* as a term of art is tied to jurisdictions and courts that applied or were influenced by civil law procedure — English admiralty, ecclesiastical courts, and the courts of the Channel Islands, as well as early American admiralty practice that inherited English forms. It has no meaningful presence in common law pleading traditions and is not a term of art in modern American or English practice.
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