Definition
Dimissoriae litterae (also rendered dimissory letters, or dismissory letters) are, in the civil law, letters issued by a lower court or judge to a higher court upon appeal, formally transmitting the record and acknowledging the transfer of jurisdiction. The phrase is Latin, meaning roughly "letters of dismissal" or "letters of sending away." They signify that the originating tribunal has released the matter and forwarded it upward for further adjudication. The documents were commonly called apostles — apostoli or apostolae — and served as the official vehicle by which the inferior court communicated to the superior court that an appeal had been lodged and that the cause was being remitted for review.
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Common Confusion
Dimissoriae litterae are easily confused with letters dimissory in ecclesiastical and canonical usage, which serve a related but distinct function: in canon law and Anglican practice, letters dimissory authorize a candidate for holy orders to be ordained by a bishop other than the bishop of the candidate's own diocese. The two uses of "dimissory letters" share a root concept — formal release or transfer from one authority to another — but one is a civil-law appellate instrument while the other is an ecclesiastical credential. Researchers encountering "letters dimissory" in historical sources should identify the governing legal system before assuming either meaning.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially a relic of civil-law appellate procedure and will appear almost exclusively in historical sources, Roman law commentary, and early ecclesiastical court records. Researchers working in civilian jurisdictions, admiralty, or canon law contexts during the medieval through early modern periods are most likely to encounter it.
Several research traps apply. First, spelling is highly variable in historical manuscripts and printed sources: dimissoriae litterae, litterae dimissoriae, dimissory letters, dismissory letters, and apostoli or apostolae are all used interchangeably. A corpus search on any single spelling may miss significant occurrences. Second, the term's appearance in Black's 2nd Edition is brief and cross-referential — it points immediately to "apostoli" — meaning researchers who do not follow that cross-reference will miss the fuller treatment. Any corpus search on this concept should run in parallel on apostoli/apostolae and letters dimissory. Third, because the civil-law tradition influenced admiralty and ecclesiastical courts in common-law jurisdictions (particularly in England prior to the Judicature Acts), the term may surface in English ecclesiastical and admiralty records even though it has no native common-law counterpart. Fourth, the Digest citation (Dig. 50, 16, 106) places the term within Justinian's compilation under the title concerning the meanings of words — de verborum significatione — which signals that even Roman jurists were treating it as a term of art requiring definition, an indication of its technical character even in its original context.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides only a brief entry, defining dimissoriae litterae as letters dimissory or dismissory in the civil law and immediately glossing them as "commonly called apostles" with a cross-reference to the Digest (Dig. 50, 16, 106) and to the entry for Apostoli. The entry is essentially a pointer rather than a standalone definition, which is itself informative: it confirms that by the time Black's second edition was compiled, the term was understood primarily through its synonym apostoli, and that "dimissoriae litterae" as a standalone phrase had little independent circulation in American legal practice.
The Digest reference is genuine and locates the term precisely within Roman law's vocabulary title, confirming antiquity and civil-law pedigree. Historical legal dictionaries in the civilian tradition would treat this more fully, since the mechanism of transmitting an appeal upward by formal letter was a procedural cornerstone of Roman appellate practice. The English common-law tradition developed its own appellate record-transmission mechanisms and had no direct equivalent, which explains the term's absence from most common-law dictionaries of the period.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term has no operative meaning in modern American or English common-law practice and is not used in contemporary statutes or court rules. It retains relevance in historical research concerning civil-law, admiralty, and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and may appear in Scottish, Continental European, or Latin American legal sources that preserved civilian appellate traditions longer than English common law did.
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