Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "from this time forward" or "henceforth." Used in historical legal instruments and pleadings to denote prospective operation — that is, to indicate a rule, obligation, prohibition, or legal effect takes hold from a specified point in time and continues into the future, rather than applying retrospectively.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern legal materials written in Law French, the formal language of English courts from roughly the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Researchers encountering it in Year Books, early plea rolls, writs, or treatises should treat it as a temporal marker signaling prospective rather than retrospective legal effect — a distinction that can be substantively significant when tracing the scope of a covenant, injunction, or statutory command recorded in primary sources of that era.
Because Law French was a specialized professional dialect rather than vernacular French, the phrase may appear in variant spellings across manuscripts and early printed sources. Abbreviation and scribal contraction were common; a researcher working with manuscript Year Books or early chancery records should not expect consistent orthography. Cross-referencing Kelham's Law French dictionary — cited by all three source dictionaries here — is the appropriate starting point for resolving variant forms.
The phrase has no operational life in modern legal drafting. Its relevance to contemporary research is almost entirely historical and interpretive: understanding what temporal scope a historical document intended to establish.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (all editions consulted), Burrill's Law Dictionary, and the second edition of Black's are in complete agreement, each offering the same compressed gloss — "from this time forward" — and each citing Kelham as the authority. This uniformity reflects the term's status as settled Law French vocabulary rather than a contested legal concept; there is nothing to dispute. The brevity of all three entries is itself informative: the dictionaries treat this as a definitional primitive, a building block of legal French whose meaning is fixed and whose legal significance lies entirely in context of use rather than in the phrase itself.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply, and what a researcher actually needs, is guidance on where the phrase typically appears and what interpretive weight it carries. None of the three sources situates the term within a broader discussion of temporal construction in historical instruments. Kelham's original glossary remains the most useful primary reference for Law French terms of this type.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is a product of the English common law tradition and Law French practice. It has no independent meaning in civil law jurisdictions or in American legal usage beyond its appearance in quoted or translated English historical sources.