Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "from the grant" or "by the grant." Used in legal writing and pleading to indicate that a right, claim, or proposition derives from or is admitted by virtue of a grant — typically a royal grant, letters patent, or a formal concession by the opposing party. The phrase signals that the matter asserted flows directly out of the grant itself, without need for further proof beyond the grant's own terms.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of historical pleading and conveyancing, appearing most frequently in older English common law records, writs, and treatises on real property and grants. Researchers working with pre-19th century English or American sources — particularly records involving royal patents, land grants, or formal charters — may encounter ex concessione as a shorthand reference to the operative source of a claimed right.
The phrase carries a logical and argumentative function: when a pleader invokes ex concessione, the argument proceeds on the basis of what has already been conceded or established by the grant. It is a way of anchoring a legal conclusion to a document already in the record rather than to an independent factual showing. This makes it particularly useful in patent and grant litigation, where disputes often turned on the construction of the grant's own language.
Researchers should be alert to the distinction between ex concessione used to mean "derived from a grant" (its primary Latin sense) and its occasional use to mean "by concession of the opponent" — that is, something admitted or conceded by the other party in argument. The two uses share the underlying logic of proceeding from something already established, but the source of the concession differs (a document versus an adversarial admission). Context will usually resolve the ambiguity, but historical sources do not always flag it.
The Reg. Orig. citation in Burrill (Registrum Originale, the collection of original writs) places this term firmly in the English writ practice tradition, suggesting its primary habitat is formal writs and early pleading records rather than substantive legal doctrine. Researchers consulting digitized writ registers, Year Books, or early American grant records should recognize the phrase as a procedural or argumentative marker rather than a term of substantive law in its own right.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources: "From, on, or by the grant," with a citation to the Registrum Originale at folio 75b. The entry is characteristically compressed — a translation and a source, nothing more. Burrill does not elaborate on the argumentative function of the phrase or distinguish between its uses in grant-based pleading and its use to signal a conceded proposition.
No broader treatment appears in the standard historical dictionaries in this corpus. The absence reflects the phrase's character as a Latin term of art used in context rather than a doctrinal concept requiring extended definition. Researchers should not expect to find developed commentary in secondary legal literature; the phrase is better traced through the primary records in which it appears.