Definition
In Roman civil law, the *dita* (also rendered *dite*) is a defense or exception available to a defendant in an action for recovery of goods, asserting that the article claimed was sold and delivered to the defendant by the plaintiff. The plea operates as a bar to the plaintiff's demand by establishing a lawful transfer of title: the defendant admits possession but denies that the plaintiff retains any right to reclaim the property, having voluntarily conveyed it by sale and delivery.
The term appears in the context of Roman exceptiones — procedural defenses interposed to defeat or suspend a plaintiff's action without contesting the underlying facts of possession. The dita is thus not a denial that the defendant holds the item, but an affirmative plea that the plaintiff's own act of selling and delivering extinguished whatever right of recovery is asserted.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "To prepare for use or action; to make ready."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To prepare for action or use; to make ready; to dight. [Obs.]" As in Spenser: "His hideous club aloft he dites."
The common word — an archaic English verb meaning to make ready or prepare — shares no meaningful connection with the civil law term. A researcher encountering "dite" in an early English legal text should determine immediately whether the author is using a vernacular archaism or invoking the Roman civil law defense; context will almost always clarify, but the overlap in spelling is a genuine source of confusion in older manuscript and printed materials.
Why It Matters in Research
The term is rarely encountered outside of civil law treatises and digests drawing directly on Roman sources. Researchers will meet it most often in works on Roman or Continental law that treat exceptiones and the law of sale — Mackeldey's Compendium of Modern Civil Law being the primary intermediary source cited by Burrill. Because the term passed through Latin into early modern legal Latin writing but never naturalized into common law vocabulary, it does not appear in standard English common law dictionaries of the same period; its absence from Bouvier, Black, or Tomlin is not an error but a reflection of the term's strictly civilian habitat.
The Digest reference (Dig. 21.3) points to the title *De exceptione rei venditae et traditae* — the exception of a thing sold and delivered — which is the organizing Roman law source for this defense. Researchers working in comparative law, Louisiana civil law sources, Scottish law, or South African law (all of which received Roman law traditions) may encounter the concept under its Latin form or its vernacular equivalents. In Louisiana practice, for instance, the underlying idea persists in the law of sales and the defense of delivered title, though the term *dita* itself is not in active modern use.
The obsolete English verb meaning "to prepare" (Webster's 1913; Spenser) appears in literary and historical texts but not in legal instruments of any recognized system. Do not conflate the two.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is compressed, offering the definition in a single sentence keyed to Mackeldey and the Digest. This compression is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of purely civil law terms — he records the concept for completeness without expanding on procedure or context. Calvinius's *Lexicon Juridicum* (Calv. Lex.), also cited, was a standard reference for Latin legal terminology and confirms that the term was recognized across seventeenth-century juristic writing.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus address this term. Bouvier does not include it; Black's early editions do not include it. The term thus exists in the English-language legal dictionary tradition almost exclusively through Burrill's entry, which itself depends entirely on the civil law treatise tradition rather than on English case law or statutory usage. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a pointer to civilian sources, not as evidence of reception into Anglo-American practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The term and the doctrine it names belong to Roman civil law and its successor systems. It has no recognized application in English common law. Jurisdictions with a civil law heritage — Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland, South Africa — may recognize the underlying exception (sale and delivery as a bar to recovery) under domestic terminology, but the Latin term itself is not operative vocabulary in those modern systems.