DINANCE - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

DINANCEAuthored

The Law Mind • 668 words

Definition

Dinance is an archaic or abbreviated form of ORDINANCE — a legislative enactment by a municipal or local governing body. The term itself carries no independent legal meaning distinct from ordinance and is not treated as a separate legal concept in American or English jurisprudence. It appears in some historical sources as a variant spelling or typographical truncation of "ordinance," particularly in older manuscripts, digests, and printed legal texts where typesetting errors or archaic orthographic conventions occasionally dropped or altered syllables.

For substantive legal purposes, researchers encountering "dinance" in a historical source should treat it as a reference to ordinance: a rule or regulation enacted by a subordinate governmental unit — most commonly a city, town, or county — pursuant to authority delegated by the state legislature.

Common Confusion

DINANCE / ORDINANCE: These are not two legal concepts. "Dinance" is a fragment or variant of "ordinance" and should be read accordingly. No court, legislature, or treatise writer has assigned distinct legal meaning to "dinance" as an independent term. Researchers who encounter it in primary sources should not pause to search for a separate body of law — redirect immediately to ORDINANCE doctrine.

Why It Matters in Research

The primary research issue here is not the legal content of the term but its identification. Researchers working in digitized historical legal corpora — including scanned session laws, municipal codes, court records, and digests — will occasionally encounter "dinance" as an artifact of OCR (optical character recognition) errors, where the leading "or-" of "ordinance" is dropped, or as a genuine archaic spelling variant. Failing to recognize this can cause a researcher to miss relevant passages or, worse, to treat the fragment as a distinct legal term requiring its own interpretation.

When this fragment appears in the Law Mind corpus, the governing legal principles are those applicable to municipal ordinances generally: the scope of delegated legislative power, the relationship between local enactments and state law, and the constitutional limits on penal regulation at the municipal level. Cross-reference to ORDINANCE for all substantive doctrine.

Bouvier's truncated entry — which begins mid-principle — also illustrates a known hazard in historical dictionary research: source truncation. The passage preserved in Bouvier's describes the foundational principles governing penal ordinances but is cut off before completing the enumerated list. Researchers relying on this fragment alone will have an incomplete picture of the doctrine Bouvier was summarizing.

Historical Dictionary Support

Bouvier's Law Dictionary does not treat "dinance" as an independent entry with its own doctrinal content. The surviving text reads as a fragment of a larger discussion of municipal legislative power, almost certainly excerpted from or condensed under a heading for ORDINANCE. The principles stated are consistent with nineteenth-century American municipal law doctrine:

First, that a legislature may, absent constitutional prohibition, delegate to municipal governments the power to prohibit and punish acts already made penal under state law when committed within municipal limits. Second — though the text cuts off — the implication of the enumeration is that such an ordinance is not rendered invalid simply because it duplicates state penalties, a point that was genuinely contested in the period and resolved differently across jurisdictions.

No other major historical legal dictionary — including Black's Law Dictionary or Wharton's Law Lexicon — carries an entry for "dinance" as a standalone term. This further confirms the term has no independent doctrinal standing and should be read as a variant of or reference to ordinance.

DINANCEmain

Bouvier's Law Dictionary • 1928

The principles upon which rests the right to enact penal ordinances is thus stated: (1) Unless forbidden by the constitution, the legislature can clothe municipal govern- ment with power to prohibit and punish any act made penal by the state laws, when done within the municipal limits. (2) Such an ordinance is not invalid, merely because it prescribes the same penalties as the state law for the commission or omission of the same act. (3) It is no valid objection to such an ordinance, that the offender may be tried and punished for the same act under both the ordinance and the state law. (4) A conviction or acquittal by the municipal courts, under such an ordinance, is no bar to a prosecution under the state law. (5) Such an ordinance is not invalid, merely because the trial thereunder is with- out a jury. (6) Nor is it invalid, because it excepts from its operation certain busi- ness pursuits that are not excepted from the operation of the state law on the same subject; 34 Fla. 440. To the same effect is id. 504. See 1 Am. L. Reg. & Rev. N. 8. 669, 869. Ordinances must not only not conflict with constitutional or general statute law, but they must be reasonable. It is, how- ever, said that what may be reasonable un- der ordinary circumstances, as a prohibi- tion against driving on the street at a greater speed than six miles an hour, would be unreasonable and void as applied to the members of a salvage corps or fire patrol responding to an alarm; 64 Minn. 287. An ordinance providing that "no person shall on any street or public place, or on land adjacent thereto, sing or recite any profane or obscene song or ballad, or use any pro- fane or obscene language," was held un- reasonable and therefore invalid; [1896] 1 Q. B. 290. It is suggested that the real ground of objection in this case was that the words "or on land adjacent thereto," were too wide, and that the other objection alone ought to be untenable because the use of profane or obscene language necessarily implies annoyance; 35 Am. L. Reg. N. S. 327. But an ordinance which conforms to a definite statutory grant of power cannot be set aside as unreasonable; 38 Atl. Rep. (N. J.) 857. A statutory power to make ordinances regulating trade does not war- rant one making it unlawful to carry on a lawful trade in a lawful manner; [1896] Α. C. 88. Municipal ordinances must be specific and definite, and they will not be construed as forbidding an act by implication; 7 Mart. 486; and, like a statute, they may be valid in some of their provisions and in- valid as to others; 84 Ala. 17; 98 id. 134; but where the invalid provisions are in- separably connected with the valid ones, the ordinance is void; 54 N. J. L. 75; 49