Definition
A Latin term from old English legal practice meaning to issue or go out. Used in procedural contexts to describe the formal issuance or awarding of writs and other process. The term appears most frequently in two constructions: *emanare brevia* (to award or issue writs) and the passive construction *quia erronicè emanavit* (because it issued erroneously), the latter serving as a ground for challenging defective process.
Common Language
Wiktionary: To flow out or issue forth; to originate from a source.
Webster's 1913: "To issue forth from a source; to flow out from a fountain; said especially of intangible things, as light, virtue, influence."
The common meaning of emanate is broad and figurative — light emanates, authority emanates. The legal Latin form *emanare* is narrower and procedural: it describes the specific, formal act of a court or officer issuing writs as a matter of official process, not mere origin or derivation in the abstract sense.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the vocabulary of medieval and early modern English writ practice and will not appear in modern procedural sources. Researchers encountering *emanare* or *emanavit* in old plea records, year books, or reported cases from the common law period should understand it as technical process language — a verb of issuance used when pleaders were arguing about whether a writ had been properly awarded or whether its issuance was defective.
The construction *quia erronicè emanavit* is particularly important to recognize. It signals a pleading or procedural objection grounded in the manner of the writ's issuance, not its substantive content. This is a trap for researchers who may misread it as a substantive error rather than a process error. The distinction between a writ that issued erroneously and one that was void on its face had practical consequences for whether a party could be compelled to answer.
Researchers working in early plea books, abridgments, or procedural treatises (Townsend's Pleading, Yelverton's Reports) will find this term embedded in Latin formulaic language surrounding writs of error, writs of prohibition, or challenges to original process. Because the term falls out of use entirely once law French and legal Latin were abolished in English courts (broadly by the mid-eighteenth century), it has no living procedural equivalent and should not be analogized casually to modern concepts of judicial issuance.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary English-language legal dictionary source for this term, and his entry is tightly accurate. He correctly identifies *emanare* as confined to old practice, supplies both the affirmative (*emanare brevia*) and the erroneous-issuance (*quia erronicè emanavit*) constructions, and pins each to a source: Townsend's Pleading at page 28 and Yelverton's Reports at page 83. These citations give researchers a path to documentary verification.
What Burrill does not provide — and what no single dictionary entry could supply — is the wider procedural context in which *emanare* and *emanavit* functioned. For that, researchers must consult the early writ-practice treatises directly. The term is absent from later American legal dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier's) because it had no purchase in American procedure, which inherited the writ system in simplified form and then abolished much of it through nineteenth-century code pleading reform.
Jurisdictional Note
Purely English in origin and application. American courts occasionally reproduced Latin writ-practice language in the colonial and early federal periods, but *emanare* does not appear to have acquired any independent doctrinal life in American jurisdictions. Researchers working in American sources after 1800 are unlikely to encounter it except in quotation of English authority.