Definition
De minis (also rendered *de minis* or, in full form, *de minis et menaciis*) is a Latin legal term meaning "of threats" or "concerning threats." It refers specifically to a historical common law writ—the writ de minis—which was available to a person who had been threatened with personal violence or the destruction of property. The writ compelled the person making the threats to give security for keeping the peace, functioning as a preventive remedy rather than a punitive one.
The writ was a precursor to modern peace bond and surety of the peace proceedings: it did not wait for harm to occur but authorized judicial intervention upon credible threat alone.
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Common Confusion
De minis is occasionally confused with *de minimis*, a far more commonly encountered Latin legal phrase meaning "of minimal importance" or "trifling," derived from *de minimis non curat lex* ("the law does not concern itself with trifles"). The two terms are unrelated in meaning and origin. De minis concerns threats and prevention of harm; de minimis concerns the threshold at which law takes notice of a matter at all. Researchers encountering either term in historical sources should take care to confirm which phrase is actually present in the text, as scribal abbreviation and typographic variation in early sources can make them easy to conflate.
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Why It Matters in Research
The writ de minis is a discontinued common law remedy with no direct modern analogue as a formal writ, though its functional purpose survives in peace bond statutes, protective order proceedings, and harassment injunctions in modern Anglo-American jurisdictions. Researchers working in pre-19th century English or early American legal materials may encounter this writ in pleading records, register entries, or treatises.
Several navigational issues arise:
**Spelling and form variants.** Historical sources spell and abbreviate this writ inconsistently. You will find *de minis*, *de menaciis*, *de minis et menaciis*, and abbreviated Latin shorthand across manuscript and early print sources. Index searches using only one form will miss occurrences.
**Confusion with de minimis in corpus search.** Any full-text search of a digitized legal corpus for "de mini" or "de minis" will return a high ratio of false positives from *de minimis* materials. Filter carefully by date (pre-1850 materials are more likely to involve the writ; post-1850 materials almost exclusively involve the de minimis doctrine) and by subject matter context.
**Primary source access.** The writ's authoritative sources—*Registrum Omnium Brevium* (Reg. Orig.) and Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium*—are the standard reference points across all three dictionary entries. Researchers needing the procedural form of the writ should consult those treatises directly; the dictionary entries themselves provide only the functional description.
**Relationship to surety of the peace.** The writ de minis sits within a cluster of preventive common law remedies including the writ of surety of the peace (*de pace tenenda*) and recognizance proceedings. Understanding de minis fully requires tracing this surrounding family of writs.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources—Black's Law Dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.), and Bouvier's Law Dictionary—provide identical substantive definitions: the writ lay where a person was threatened with personal violence or destruction of property, and its purpose was to compel the offender to keep the peace. All three cite the same two authorities: *Registrum Omnium Brevium* at pages 88b–89, and Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium* at 79 G and 80.
The uniformity across entries reflects the writ's status as settled historical record rather than live doctrine: by the time these dictionaries were compiled, de minis had long ceased to be a practical remedy. None of the three entries discusses the writ's relationship to modern surety of the peace proceedings or its functional successors, which is a meaningful gap for researchers trying to trace doctrinal continuity. Bouvier's entry adds a brief "See" cross-reference that is incomplete in the surviving digitized text, suggesting a reference to a related entry that may be worth tracing in the full print edition.
No material divergence exists among the three sources on substance.
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Jurisdictional Note
The writ de minis was a creature of English common law and was carried into early American practice in jurisdictions that received the common law. Its functional descendants—peace bonds, sureties of the peace, and statutory protective orders—vary considerably by state in both procedure and terminology, though the underlying rationale of preventive judicial intervention on threat of harm is broadly shared.
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