Definition
A Latin maxim, translating roughly as "divorce is said to be" or "divorce is called [from]." The phrase appears in classical and medieval legal commentary as the opening of an explanatory maxim concerning the etymology and nature of divorce — specifically, the proposition that the word *divortium* derives from the divergence of ways (from *divertere*, to turn apart), signifying the separation of two persons who had been joined in marriage. In legal usage, the phrase functions less as a freestanding legal rule and more as a doctrinal preamble introducing the canonical Roman and canon law definition of divorce as a formal sundering of the matrimonial bond.
The maxim was most fully expressed in the form: *Divortium dicitur a divertendo, quia vir et uxor divertunt vias suas* — "Divorce is so called from diverting, because husband and wife turn aside from their ways." This formulation appears in glossators' treatments of Roman law and was carried into ecclesiastical legal commentaries as a definitional anchor for the concept of marital dissolution.
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Common Confusion
DIVORTIUM DICITUR should not be treated as a term of operative legal effect. It is a maxim of definition, not a rule of decision. Researchers encountering it in historical texts may mistake it for a substantive legal principle governing the grounds or effects of divorce. It is not. Its function is purely classificatory and etymological — it introduces the concept of divorce within a Roman or canon law framework, not a rule that a court applied to reach a result.
It should also be distinguished from *divortium a mensa et thoro* (divorce from bed and board, a legal separation without dissolution of the marriage bond) and *divortium a vinculo matrimonii* (divorce from the bond of marriage, a full dissolution). The phrase *divortium dicitur* precedes and frames these distinctions but is not synonymous with either.
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Why It Matters in Research
The phrase appears primarily in early modern and medieval legal treatises, glossaries, and ecclesiastical commentaries. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus are most likely to encounter it in:
1. **Canon law materials and ecclesiastical court records**, where definitional maxims of this kind were used to frame the jurisdiction of church courts over matrimonial causes.
2. **Civil law treatises** drawing on the Corpus Juris Civilis tradition, particularly commentaries on the Digest and Institutes where Roman marriage law is being explained or synthesized.
3. **Early common law works** that borrowed civilian and canonical vocabulary when discussing divorce jurisdiction before the secular courts had a mature doctrine of their own.
The research trap here is treating the maxim as evidence of a legal rule rather than a definitional convention. If you find *divortium dicitur* in a 16th- or 17th-century English ecclesiastical text, it signals that the author is grounding their analysis in Roman or canon law foundations — a contextual clue about the author's intellectual framework, not a holding or precedent. It may also signal a text with civilian rather than common law orientation, which affects how you should weight and situate the source within the broader corpus.
The phrase has essentially no operational life in post-Reformation English law or American law. After the English Reformation stripped ecclesiastical courts of much of their matrimonial jurisdiction, and after American jurisdictions developed statutory divorce law, the definitional machinery of the Roman tradition — including maxims like this one — ceased to appear in operative legal documents.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) does not contain a complete, usable entry for *divortium dicitur* in the source material available. The surrounding text in the source — referencing Lincolnshire, "riding" in Yorkshire, and division of opinion among appellate judges — appears to be an artifact of page-boundary truncation from the source document, and bears no relationship to the present term. No substantive definition is recoverable from that excerpt.
The phrase is, however, a well-documented maxim in the civilian and canon law traditions. Its most familiar form (*divortium dicitur a divertendo*) appears in commentaries on the Digest and in medieval canonist literature. Bouvier's Law Dictionary and older English law dictionaries treat *divortium* primarily through its subtypes (*a mensa et thoro* and *a vinculo matrimonii*) rather than through this definitional maxim, reflecting the more practical orientation of common law reference works.
What historical dictionaries collectively miss is the function of the phrase as a framing device within a larger analytical tradition. By treating *divortium* entries primarily in terms of remedies and classifications, they obscure the fact that *divortium dicitur* in a source text is doing something different — it is a signal of intellectual lineage, not a rule statement.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase belongs to the Roman and canon law traditions and has no operative meaning in any contemporary common law jurisdiction. It may appear in historical records from jurisdictions with strong civilian influence — Louisiana, Quebec, and colonial ecclesiastical courts — but even there it functions as a scholarly or rhetorical device rather than a term of art with legal consequences.
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