Definition
De vicineto (Latin: "from the neighborhood" or "from the vicinage") is a term of historical common law procedure describing a jury drawn from the locality where the facts in dispute arose or where the relevant events occurred. A jury de vicineto was constituted of persons from the neighborhood of the parties or the subject matter, on the theory that local residents would have direct knowledge of the relevant circumstances and could render an informed verdict.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker for understanding the historical foundations of the jury-of-the-vicinage requirement, which survives in modern constitutional form in the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of trial by an "impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed." Researchers encountering de vicineto in pre-nineteenth-century treatises, writs, or procedural materials should understand that it signals the older, knowledge-based rationale for local juries — jurors were expected to know the facts from personal acquaintance, not merely to decide them from evidence presented at trial. This stands in sharp contrast to the modern requirement of juror impartiality, which presupposes that jurors know nothing about the case in advance.
The shift from knowledge to ignorance as the juror ideal is one of the most significant conceptual reversals in Anglo-American procedural history, and de vicineto sits at the origin point of the older model. Sources citing Blackstone's Commentaries volume 3 (the standard reference in all four source dictionaries here) are working from his treatment of the jury's historical constitution, not from any statutory or modern procedural rule. Researchers should not import the term into contemporary analysis without accounting for this foundational transformation.
Burrill's cross-reference to "Vicinetum" is useful: that entry develops the concept of vicinage as a territorial unit more fully and should be consulted alongside this entry when tracing the doctrinal lineage of venue and jury-composition rules.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in complete agreement: de vicineto means "from the neighborhood, or vicinage" and is a term applied to a jury. Each traces the usage to 3 Blackstone's Commentaries 360. There is no divergence of meaning across the sources, which reflects the term's stable, purely historical character — by the time these dictionaries were compiled, de vicineto was already an antiquarian reference rather than active pleading terminology.
Burrill adds the most contextual value by cross-referencing Vicinetum and by situating the entry within the broader neighborhood of related writs (including de vi laica amovenda), which helps researchers orient the term within the Latin writ vocabulary of early common law procedure. Rapalje & Lawrence and the two Black's editions offer identical single-sentence definitions, confirming that the term had no contested or evolving meaning in legal usage by the late nineteenth century.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the doctrinal trajectory: none explains that the de vicineto jury, premised on neighborhood knowledge, gave way to the modern impartial jury premised on the absence of prior knowledge. This gap is significant for researchers studying jury history or constitutional vicinage doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The constitutional vicinage requirement in the United States applies to federal criminal trials under the Sixth Amendment. Most states have analogous provisions in their own constitutions or procedural rules, but the specific contours vary. De vicineto as a Latin term of art appears in historical sources regardless of jurisdiction; its relevance to modern doctrine is primarily federal constitutional.