Definition
A Roman law term denoting a fractional subdivision of the as — the standard Roman unit of measurement used in law to express proportional shares of an estate, inheritance, or debt. The dodrans represents nine unciae out of the as's twelve, yielding a proportion of nine-twelfths, or three-quarters (3/4). It appears principally in the context of Roman inheritance law, where the as served as the universal denominator for dividing estates among heirs and legatees.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A bronze coin of the Roman Republic, worth three quarters of an as.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not attested. The term did not enter general English usage.
The legal meaning and the numismatic meaning share the same underlying fraction — three-quarters — but operate in entirely different registers. In legal contexts, the dodrans is not a coin at all. It is an abstract fractional unit used to express a proportional share of an estate or obligation. A researcher encountering dodrans in a legal source should not read it as a monetary denomination but as a ratio describing an heir's or legatee's entitlement.
Common Confusion
The dodrans is one of several fractional terms derived from the Roman as, and researchers unfamiliar with the system may struggle to distinguish among them. The as was divided into twelve unciae (singular: uncia), and each named fraction corresponded to a fixed number of those units: the semis (six unciae, or one-half), the bes or bessis (eight unciae, or two-thirds), the dodrans (nine unciae, or three-quarters), the dextans (ten unciae, or five-sixths), and the deunx (eleven unciae, or eleven-twelfths). Conflating these terms produces significant errors when reconstructing the intended distribution of a Roman estate. The uncia itself also carries over into English legal history as the root of "ounce" and as a fractional concept in medieval property division, adding another layer of potential confusion.
Why It Matters in Research
The dodrans appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with Roman private law — particularly the law of succession — and in English legal works that survey Roman legal foundations. Its practical relevance to Anglo-American common law research is minimal, but researchers working in several specific contexts will encounter it.
First, comparative and historical inheritance law. Treatises on Roman succession law use the as-fraction system throughout. Understanding the dodrans as three-quarters of the whole is essential to following the arithmetic of estate division when multiple heirs or legatees are assigned different fractional shares that must sum to the as.
Second, early English legal scholarship. Blackstone's Commentaries reference the Roman fractional system in the context of explaining foundational concepts of property division. The citation appearing across all three source dictionaries — 2 Bl. Comm. 462, note — anchors the dodrans in that tradition and signals that English legal writers understood it as background to inheritance principles.
Third, civil law jurisdictions and their historical sources. Legal historians working with Spanish, French, Portuguese, or Italian colonial law — systems with deeper Roman law roots — may encounter the Roman fraction terminology in learned legal commentary more frequently than researchers focused purely on English common law sources.
The term is not a live concept in any modern jurisdiction. It functions as a historical and comparative reference point, not an operative legal term.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — provide substantively identical entries: a Latin term from Roman law, a subdivision of the as, nine unciae, the proportion of nine-twelfths or three-fourths. All three cite 2 Bl. Comm. 462, note; Burrill adds a citation to Taylor's Civil Law at page 492. No source elaborates on the inheritance law context in which the term would have been applied, nor do any of them distinguish the dodrans from adjacent fractional units in the Roman system. This is a case where the historical dictionaries are consistent but thin — they give the definition accurately and stop there. Researchers needing to understand how the dodrans operated within the full as-fraction system in Roman succession law will need to go beyond dictionary sources to Roman law treatises.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Roman Law of Succession; Fractional Units in Roman Private Law; The As and Its Subdivisions.