Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "jointly" or "together," used in old English and Roman law to describe an interest, obligation, or legal act held or performed by two or more persons as a unified body rather than separately. Where property is held or a legacy is given conjunctim, the recipients take as a collective unit, not as individuals with distinct severable shares. The term appears most often in the law of property and legacies, where the manner of holding — joint versus several — determined rights of survivorship, the power to alienate, and the mechanics of partition.
Common Confusion
CONJUNCTIM vs. DIVISIM vs. CONJUNCTIM ET DIVISIM. These three Latin adverbs describe a spectrum of joint and several obligation in old legal instruments. Conjunctim alone means jointly — one collective interest. Divisim (or separatim) means severally — each party holds or owes independently. Conjunctim et divisim means jointly and severally, imposing full collective and individual liability simultaneously. Misreading any of these in a historical deed, will, or plea can fundamentally alter whether survivorship rights applied and whether a co-holder could act unilaterally.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering conjunctim in historical sources — particularly pleadings, deeds of conveyance, and wills from the medieval and early modern English periods — must read it against the surrounding instrument with care. The term is not ornamental; its presence or absence directly governed whether tenancy was joint (with right of survivorship) or severable, and whether a legacy vested in co-legatees collectively or could be claimed proportionally by each.
Two research traps are worth noting. First, the phrase conjunctim et pro indiviso (jointly and undividedly), noted in Burrill, appears in property instruments where parties wished to make explicit that no severance had occurred and no individual could demand partition as of right. This phrase is not synonymous with straightforward joint tenancy and may signal a deliberate effort to preclude acts that would sever the joint interest. Second, Scottish legal usage favored the anglicized conjunctly over conjunctim, and researchers crossing between English and Scottish historical sources will find the Scots form in instruments and case reports where the Latin would appear in comparable English documents. Burrill's note directing readers to Kames' Equity on this point is a useful bridge.
The compound form conjunctim tenens (joint tenant) appears in the Registrum Judiciale and is an early technical designation; researchers tracing the doctrinal history of joint tenancy should note this as a source-layer predating the fuller common-law elaborations in Coke and Blackstone.
Because conjunctim belongs to the vocabulary of Latin legal formulae largely abandoned after the transition to English pleading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it rarely appears in American legal sources. Researchers in American law who encounter it are almost certainly reading English sources, translated Roman law materials, or early colonial documents modeled on English forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition — "jointly" — and cite the same institutional authority, Justinian's Institutes (2.20.8), which addresses legacies given to multiple legatees and the question of whether each takes a share or whether the gift is collective. Black's first and second editions give the bare definition without elaboration. Burrill is the richer source: he supplies the Bracton citation (fol. 19), the Scottish equivalent conjunctly with a reference to Kames' Equity, the Registrum Judiciale reference for conjunctim tenens, and the compound phrase conjunctim et pro indiviso from 2 Modern Reports 63. The Latin dictionary sources confirm that classical Latin usage of conjunctim was relatively rare and primarily adverbial, meaning "unitedly" or "in common," consistent with the legal usage but without the technical property-law freight the term acquired in medieval legal Latin.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the interpretive consequence of conjunctim appearing in proximity to other Latin qualifiers. Researchers should not rely on the dictionary definitions alone when parsing complex multi-party instruments; the phrase-level context controls the legal effect.
Jurisdictional Note
Conjunctim is a term of old English and Roman law with no independent life in modern American statutory or common-law doctrine. Its practical relevance today is confined to historical document research — English, Scottish, and early colonial American materials. Scottish sources use the anglicized conjunctly as the functional equivalent.