Definition
Latin: "according to the laws." A maxim of Roman civil law declaring that law must be understood and applied according to its spirit and intent, not merely its literal text or words. The full formulation, preserved in the Digest of Justinian, reads: Ex legibus accipiendum est tam ex legum sententia quam ex verbis — that is, what is received from the laws must be taken from both the sense or purpose of the laws and from their words. The phrase thus stands as an early articulation of purposive or intentionalist interpretation, asserting that the meaning of a law cannot be reduced to its bare letter alone.
Common Confusion
Ex legibus is sometimes loosely read as simply meaning "by law" or "under law" — a near-synonym for phrases like secundum legem or ex lege. The distinction matters. Ex lege typically denotes something arising by operation of law, without more. Ex legibus, as fixed by Digest 50.16.6, carries a specific interpretive meaning: it does not merely invoke legal authority but declares how legal authority must be read. A researcher encountering ex legibus in a civil law source should treat it as a hermeneutical signal, not a generic legal citation. Conflating the two risks missing that the author is making a point about statutory construction, not simply asserting that something is legally required.
Why It Matters in Research
Ex legibus appears rarely in common law sources precisely because English legal tradition historically leaned toward textualism and the plain-meaning rule rather than openly embracing the civilian spirit-of-the-law approach. When you encounter ex legibus in historical legal writing, its presence is almost always diagnostic: the author is drawing on civilian or canon law tradition, often to argue against a hyper-literal reading of a statute or instrument.
In Law Mind corpus research, the phrase surfaces most predictably in three contexts: (1) treatises and commentaries bridging common law and civil law, particularly from the 16th through 18th centuries, where writers invoked Roman authority to push back against rigid literalism; (2) ecclesiastical and admiralty sources, where civilian doctrine had deeper roots than in common law courts; and (3) Scottish, South African, and Louisiana legal materials, where the civil law tradition remained operative.
The historical dictionaries all cite Digest 50.16.6 as the anchor text, but none develop the interpretive stakes. A researcher working in statutory construction history should note that ex legibus anticipates debates that recur — under entirely different names — in modern Anglo-American jurisprudence around purposivism versus textualism. The phrase is not an artifact; it is an early position in an unresolved argument.
Sources before roughly 1800 may pair ex legibus with Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum (the "Calvin" and "Calv. Lex." references in Burrill and Black's), which was a standard civilian reference dictionary. If you see that citation cluster in a text, the author is almost certainly working within a civilian or hybrid-civilian framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on the definition and share the same Digest citation. Burrill adds the fuller Latin quotation — Ex legibus accipiendum est tam ex legum sententia quam ex verbis — which Black's abbreviates. This fuller form is more useful for research because it makes explicit the two-part structure of the maxim: sententia (sense, intent, purpose) and verba (words, letter). Burrill's inclusion of the reference to Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum is also practically useful, as it helps date and locate texts that use this citation cluster.
What all three historical dictionaries omit is any discussion of how the maxim was actually deployed in argument, or whether common law courts ever invoked it directly. The entries treat ex legibus as a definition to be recorded rather than a concept to be contextualized. That gap is the researcher's work to fill.
Jurisdictional Note
Ex legibus is a civil law term with no direct common law analogue, and it carries operative weight primarily in jurisdictions with civilian heritage — Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland, South Africa, and in historical ecclesiastical and admiralty practice. In purely common law jurisdictions, it appears almost exclusively in scholarly and comparative writing rather than in judicial usage.