Definition
In old English law, droit droit (also written dreit dreit) denotes a double right — the union of the right of possession with the right of property in the same person. When both rights coincide in one holder, that person is said to have a complete or perfect title to the land. The concept was most significant in the law of real property, where possession and ownership could be severed, creating competing claims that only the reunification of both rights could conclusively resolve.
Common Confusion
Droit droit should not be confused with droit écrit, an entirely separate French legal term meaning "written law" and referring to the Roman civil law (Corpus Juris Civilis) as received in France. The two terms share only the word droit (right/law in French) and appear in proximity in some historical dictionaries, including Burrill's. Droit droit is a common law property concept; droit écrit is a civil law / legal history term. A researcher encountering both in a single historical source should treat them as unrelated entries.
Why It Matters in Research
Droit droit is a term of medieval common law property doctrine, and researchers encountering it in historical sources must understand it within the framework of the old real actions — the procedural world before the reforms that swept away the forms of action. The term appears in Blackstone, Coke, and the early commentators precisely because the distinction between the right of possession (jus possessionis) and the right of property (jus proprietatis) governed which real action a claimant could bring and what remedy was available.
Researchers working in early English land law sources should watch for terminological inconsistency: the term appears as both droit droit and dreit dreit depending on the source and period, reflecting variation between Law French spelling conventions. Burrill himself cross-references both spellings. When searching digitized historical corpora, run both forms.
The concept quietly disappears from practical legal discourse after the real actions are abolished — in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and the Common Law Procedure Act 1852, and in American jurisdictions as common law pleading reforms took hold through the nineteenth century. By the time of Kent's Commentaries, the doctrine was already historical rather than operative, though Kent invokes it to explain foundational property concepts. Researchers using droit droit as a research trail should be aware they are following a thread that goes cold in active American jurisprudence by the mid-nineteenth century; its later appearances are pedagogical, not doctrinal.
The term also serves as a gateway concept for understanding why fee simple absolute became the dominant form of landholding: consolidating both rights in one person eliminated the ambiguity that droit droit was designed to describe.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal historical dictionary source here. Burrill defines droit droit as "a double right — the right of possession united with the right of property," citing Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Com. 199), Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 266a), Reeves' History of English Law, and Kent's Commentaries (4 Kent's Com. 373). The Latin equivalent given is jus duplicatum, confirming the civil law parallel to the concept.
Blackstone's treatment at 2 Bl. Com. 199 is the authoritative common law exposition: he explains that when the right of possession and the right of property are united, the possessor has the most complete title the law can confer. Coke's usage in Co. Litt. 266a traces the concept to its medieval roots.
No significant divergence exists among the historical sources on the core meaning; the term was never contested in definition, only important in application. What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any treatment of why the concept became obsolete — they record the doctrine but do not mark its endpoint, which is a gap researchers must supply from knowledge of procedural reform history.
Jurisdictional Note
Droit droit is a concept of English common law with no independent development in American jurisdictions. American commentators such as Kent adopted it descriptively to explain property foundations, but it never generated American case law as an operative doctrine. Civil law jurisdictions do not use the concept.