Definition
Entry ad terminum qui praeteriit (Latin: "entry for the term which has passed") was a common law writ of entry available to a lessor or reversioner when a tenant held possession of land beyond the expiration of a lawful term. The writ was used to recover seisin of the land in two principal situations: (1) where a tenant for years held over after the term of years had expired, and (2) where a tenant for the life of another (a tenant pur autre vie) remained in possession after the measuring life had ended. In both cases, the tenant's continued possession had become wrongful, and the writ provided the legal mechanism to restore the rightful owner.
The phrase "qui praeteriit" — "which has passed" — names the wrong precisely: the term has gone by, the tenant's lawful authority has expired, and what was once a valid possessory right has become a bare holding-over without title.
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Common Confusion
The writ of entry ad terminum qui praeteriit is sometimes conflated with other writs of entry that similarly addressed wrongful possession, particularly the writ of entry in the per (where a stranger wrongfully entered) or the writ of entry in the per and cui (reaching one step further through a chain of wrongful transfer). The distinction matters for historical research: ad terminum qui praeteriit addressed a specific and narrow fact pattern — lawful entry that became unlawful by lapse of time — whereas the other writs addressed entries wrongful from their inception or wrongful transfers of a prior wrongful possessor's interest. Researchers encountering any of these writs in historical pleading records should identify which degree of wrong is alleged before treating authorities on one as interchangeable with the others.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is an archaic pleading term encountered almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth century English and early American common law sources. Researchers are unlikely to find it in modern case law; its practical significance today is historical and doctrinal.
Several navigational notes for corpus research:
First, the Latin is frequently abbreviated or corrupted in manuscript and early print sources. "Ad terminum qui" appears in shorter references, while the full form "ad terminum qui praeteriit" appears in formal treatise and register contexts. Search strategies should account for both forms and for variant spellings of "praeteriit" (including "præteriit," reflecting the ae ligature common in older typography).
Second, the writ belongs to the broader family of writs of entry — a category that was itself abolished in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and more comprehensively by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852, which replaced the old real actions with ejectment as the standard possessory remedy. In American jurisdictions, the common law real actions were abolished piecemeal across the nineteenth century. Researchers working in early American sources should be alert to the possibility that courts were applying or citing these writs from English authority even as domestic reform legislation was displacing them.
Third, the writ sits at the intersection of landlord-tenant law and the law of real actions. Corpus connections to pursue include: the broader doctrine of holding over (and its relationship to tenancy at sufferance), the medieval Registers of Writs (which specified the approved forms), and early English property treatises such as Littleton's Tenures and Coke upon Littleton, where the gradations of writs of entry are discussed systematically.
Fourth, the pur autre vie variant — where the measuring life dies and the tenant holds over — touches on a distinctive feature of estates law that persists in modified form in modern property doctrine. Researchers tracing the history of life estates and the interests of remaindermen will encounter this writ in that doctrinal lineage.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence (drawing from Termes de la Ley) provides a compact but accurate statement of the writ's two operative fact patterns: the holdover after a term of years, and the holdover after the death of the cestui que vie in a pur autre vie tenancy. The source correctly identifies both as triggering the writ and attributes the formulation to Termes de la Ley, one of the earliest printed English law dictionaries, which itself drew from medieval pleading practice.
What Rapalje & Lawrence does not address — and what the entry-level researcher should supplement from treatise sources — is the procedural character of the writ: it was a real action, not a personal action, and it operated on the degree-of-wrong theory that organized the entire family of writs of entry. The writ was limited in its reach to the immediate wrong (the lapse of the term); it could not follow the land through subsequent transfers to third parties the way the more extended writs (in the per and cui, or in the post) could.
No other source dictionary in the current corpus covers this term. The Termes de la Ley citation in Rapalje & Lawrence points researchers toward the primary historical authority, and Coke upon Littleton remains the most authoritative English-language treatise source for contextualizing the writ within the broader system of real actions.
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Jurisdictional Note
The writ was a creature of English common law and was received into American colonial and early state practice as part of the inherited common law. Its availability and procedural requirements varied by state depending on how fully each jurisdiction adopted the English forms of action; by the mid-nineteenth century most American states had abolished or superseded real actions by statute. English abolition came through the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and the Common Law Procedure Act 1852.
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