Definition
De identitate nominis (Latin: "concerning identity of name") was a common law writ available to a person who had been arrested in a personal action and imprisoned due to a mistaken identity — specifically, where the person taken into custody shared the same name as the true defendant but was not the individual against whom the action was brought. The writ provided a mechanism for the wrongly imprisoned person to assert that misidentification, not a defect in the underlying action, was the cause of the wrongful detention, and to seek release on that basis.
The writ was a procedural remedy, not a challenge to the merits of the original suit. It addressed a narrow but practically recurring problem in an era when identification was difficult to verify and arrest processes were executed on name alone.
---
Common Language
The term has no meaningful foothold in modern ordinary English. It is pure Latin legal terminology with no common-usage counterpart in either modern or historical general dictionaries. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
---
Common Confusion
De identitate nominis is sometimes loosely associated with habeas corpus because both provide relief from wrongful imprisonment. The distinction matters: habeas corpus challenges the legal authority or sufficiency of the grounds for detention broadly; de identitate nominis addressed the precise and narrow problem of mistaken identity arising from a shared name, within the context of a personal civil action. A researcher encountering references to wrongful arrest remedies in early common law sources should not assume habeas corpus was the only or default instrument — specialized writs like this one occupied distinct procedural niches.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law sources, colonial American practice, or pre-nineteenth-century procedural materials should treat de identitate nominis as a marker of the highly granular writ system that preceded modern civil procedure. Several navigational points apply:
**Corpus placement.** The writ appears primarily in registers of writs — the *Registrum Omnium Brevium* (Reg. Orig.) — rather than in reported case law. Researchers should not expect to find the writ litigated in the reports; its presence in the register confirms it was a recognized form, not necessarily a frequently litigated remedy.
**Historical obsolescence.** De identitate nominis did not survive the abolition of the forms of action. In England, the Common Law Procedure Acts of the mid-nineteenth century, and in the United States, the field codes modeled on the New York Code of 1848, dismantled the writ system as such. Modern remedies for wrongful arrest or mistaken identity proceed through entirely different channels — habeas corpus, civil rights statutes, or tort law. A researcher tracing the modern law of mistaken-identity arrests will find no direct lineage from this writ.
**Name as identity.** The writ reflects a systemic vulnerability of the pre-modern legal process: arrest writs ran by name, not by description or verified identity. This context is essential for understanding not just this writ but the broader problem of idem sonans (same-sounding names) in early pleading and process, a doctrine with a longer lifespan than de identitate nominis itself.
**Source reliability.** All three dictionary sources consulted cite Reg. Orig. 194 as the authority. Researchers should treat this citation as the primary source and not rely on the dictionary definitions as independent authority. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry conflates the de identitate nominis entry with the following entry (de idiota inquirendo) due to a typographic run-on — a common artifact in nineteenth-century legal dictionary printing that can mislead researchers parsing entries from scanned or transcribed texts.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
The three sources consulted are in precise verbal agreement: all define de identitate nominis as a writ for one arrested in a personal action and imprisoned through a mistake of identity, the true defendant bearing the same name, and all cite Reg. Orig. 194 as the sole authority. There is no divergence in substance across any edition.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any discussion of how frequently the writ was invoked, whether it generated reported decisions, or what procedural steps the imprisoned party had to take to obtain it. They also do not situate the writ within the larger landscape of mistaken-identity remedies or explain its relationship to habeas corpus. These gaps reflect the dictionaries' function as reference registers rather than treatises.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is physically garbled in the source text, with the de idiota inquirendo definition running directly into the de identitate nominis entry without a clear break. Researchers using scanned or OCR-processed versions of that dictionary should verify which definition belongs to which entry.
---
Jurisdictional Note
De identitate nominis was an English common law writ. American colonial and early republic practice inherited the English writ system, but there is no evidence of substantial independent American development of this specific writ. Its relevance in American legal research is primarily historical and comparative.
---