Definition
In Roman civil law, *creare* (Latin) means to create, constitute, or appoint. The term was used specifically in contexts where a legal authority or status was formally called into being by official act — most commonly the appointment of a guardian (*tutor* or *curator*) over a minor or incompetent person. The act of *creare* carried the sense of investing a person with a legal office or capacity through a recognized legal process, not merely designating them informally.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Creare* is a Latin verb meaning "to make, produce, beget, or elect to an office." In modern English, it survives primarily through derivatives such as "create" and "creation," conveying the general idea of bringing something new into existence.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's does not carry *creare* as a headword, treating it as a Latin source term rather than an English word. The English "create" is defined as "to bring into being; to form out of nothing; to invest with a new form, office, or character."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is one of precision rather than opposition. Where ordinary English "create" suggests origination from nothing, the civil law *creare* denotes a formal juridical act of constitution or appointment — the emphasis falls on legal investiture within an existing framework, not on origination. A guardian is not invented; they are formally appointed and thereby vested with legal authority.
---
Why It Matters in Research
*Creare* appears in researchers' paths most often through the Digest (*Digesta Justiniani*) and related civilian sources, where it marks the formal act by which guardianship (*tutela*) was constituted. Burrill's citation to Dig. 26.5.21 places it squarely in the title *De confirmatione tutorum vel curatorum* — the confirmation of tutors and curators — which is a concentrated site for civil law doctrine on how guardianship authority was formally created and validated.
Researchers working with common law sources should note that the civilian vocabulary of *creare* and its surrounding apparatus did not transfer wholesale into English equity or common law guardianship doctrine, even though the substantive concern — protecting persons under legal disability — did. When reading early English equity materials or ecclesiastical court records that cite or paraphrase civilian sources, *creare* signals that the writer is drawing on Roman law rather than domestic common law tradition. This distinction matters for tracing doctrinal lineage.
For legal historians studying the reception of Roman law in England and Scotland, *creare* serves as a marker of civilian influence. Scots law, which maintained a closer relationship with the *ius commune*, used the civil law vocabulary of guardianship more consistently than English equity did; researchers tracing guardianship doctrine through Scottish institutional writers will encounter *creare* and its cognates more frequently than in parallel English sources.
The term's brevity in historical dictionaries (Burrill's entry is itself compact) means that dictionary support alone will not carry a researcher far. The productive path is through the Digest directly, and through treatises on Roman private law that gloss the guardianship titles in detail.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is concise but accurate: it identifies *creare* as a civil law term meaning to create, constitute, or appoint, glosses the specific application to guardianship, supplies the Greek equivalent (*χειροτονεῖν*, meaning to elect or appoint by show of hands), and cites Dig. 26.5.21. The Greek gloss is noteworthy — it signals the connection between the Roman juridical act and earlier Greek practices of formal public appointment, and reflects the learned comparative habit of mid-nineteenth-century legal lexicography.
No other source dictionaries in the present corpus carry this term. The absence of *creare* from common law dictionaries such as Black's or Bouvier's is itself informative: the term was considered sufficiently foreign to domestic common law doctrine that general American legal dictionaries did not require it. Its appearance in Burrill reflects that work's stronger civilian and comparative orientation compared to its contemporaries.
Burrill does not discuss the distinction between *creare* and related Latin verbs of appointment such as *constituere* or *nominare*, which can shade into overlapping territory in the sources. Researchers reading Digest texts should attend to those distinctions contextually rather than relying on any single dictionary entry to resolve them.
---
Jurisdictional Note
*Creare* as a technical term of art belongs to the Roman civil law tradition and is not operative terminology in modern common law jurisdictions. Its relevance is primarily historical and comparative. Scots law and mixed civil law jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, South Africa) may carry civilian guardianship vocabulary closer to the Roman original, making *creare* more directly relevant in those research contexts than in English or American common law research.
---