Definition
Law French phrase meaning "of common right" — that is, by or according to the common law. The phrase signals that a right, rule, or entitlement derives from the general body of the common law rather than from statute, local custom, equity, or royal prerogative. Where a legal text uses de comon droit, it is asserting that the proposition stated is the default legal position: what the law provides in the absence of special modification.
Common Confusion
De comon droit is occasionally grouped mentally with other Law French phrases beginning with "de" — de bonis non, de son tort, de novo — but it shares no doctrinal family with these terms. Each is an independent phrase. The only connection is the shared linguistic register of Law French. Researchers new to historical sources should resist treating Law French phrases as a coherent doctrinal category; they are simply the vocabulary of a particular period of English legal writing.
Why It Matters in Research
This term functions as a doctrinal signal, not a freestanding legal concept, which makes it easy to overlook and easy to misread. When encountered in older English legal sources — Year Books, early common law treatises, Coke's commentaries — de comon droit marks a contrast. The writer is distinguishing the baseline common law rule from something that has displaced it: a local custom, a statutory exception, a grant of special privilege, or an equitable modification. Missing that contrast means missing the analytical move the source is making.
The phrase appears most reliably in Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 142a), the primary citation in all three source dictionaries. Researchers working with that text or with sources citing it should treat de comon droit as a pointer to Coke's broader framework for distinguishing common law entitlements from special or modified ones. It is not a term of art that generated its own line of doctrine; it is rhetorical and structural shorthand.
Because the phrase is Law French — the archaic Anglo-Norman legal dialect used in English courts through the seventeenth century — it will not appear in modern legal materials. Researchers should be alert to variant spellings in manuscript and early printed sources: "de commun droit," "de common droit," and similar forms all carry the same meaning. The second edition of Black's reproduces the phrase with a typographical artifact ("Oo. Litt." rather than "Co. Litt."), a reminder that digitized versions of historical dictionaries can introduce errors that distort source-tracing.
No jurisdictional variation is relevant: the phrase belongs exclusively to the historical English common law tradition. It has no operative use in modern American, English, or Commonwealth legal writing.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on both translation and meaning: "of common right; by the common law." The entries are brief and convergent, which reflects the phrase's nature as transparent explanatory shorthand rather than a contested term of art. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's all anchor the definition to Co. Litt. 142a, suggesting that Coke's usage is the definitive reference point across the historical dictionary tradition.
Burrill's entry is notable for its placement: the dictionary runs de comon droit directly into the separate entry for de computo (writ of account) with minimal break, a common artifact of the compressed, alphabetical format of nineteenth-century legal dictionaries. Researchers should not infer any substantive connection between the two entries.
None of the source dictionaries contextualize the phrase beyond its translation. They do not discuss how frequently Coke deployed it, what contrasts it was meant to draw, or how Law French phrases of this type functioned rhetorically in early modern legal writing. For that context, researchers must go to primary sources and to scholarship on Law French as a legal language.