Definition
A Latin term used in early common law pleading and legal instruments meaning "being" or "existing." It functioned as a participial modifier to indicate present existence or current status at the time of a writing or pleading — most commonly appearing in phrases such as existens heres (being heir) or existens in vita (being alive). The term did not carry an independent substantive legal meaning; it operated grammatically to confirm a state of fact at the relevant moment.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering existens in historical pleadings, writs, or deeds should treat it as a status-confirming term rather than a term of art with legal consequences of its own. Its significance is almost entirely contextual: it tells you something about the condition of the person or thing it modifies at a specific point in time. This matters when working through chain-of-title documents, succession records, or pleadings where the precise moment of a status — being alive, being seised, being heir — determines legal outcome.
The term appears with some frequency in pre-nineteenth-century English legal Latin and in colonial American instruments that followed English drafting conventions. As legal drafting shifted toward English and away from Law Latin through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, existens disappeared from active use, surviving only in quotations from earlier authorities or in chancery and ecclesiastical records that retained Latin longer than common law courts.
Burrill's sparse entry (citing 2 Strange) signals that even by the mid-nineteenth century, existens was largely a relic requiring no more than a translation gloss. Researchers relying on Burrill for guidance on a specific phrase involving existens should locate the underlying source — Strange's Reports or the instrument in question — rather than relying on the dictionary note alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill defines existens simply as "Being," citing 2 Strange (2 Stra.), one of the standard English reporters covering King's Bench decisions from the early eighteenth century. The entry is minimal, reflecting the term's character as a straightforward Latin participle rather than a developed legal concept. No substantive doctrinal content attaches to the word itself in Burrill's treatment; the dictionary reference serves primarily as a translation aid for readers encountering the term in older texts.
No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Jacob, not Tomlin, not Bouvier — give existens a standalone entry, which is consistent with its function as grammatical connective tissue rather than legal concept. Researchers should not expect more definitional depth from contemporaneous sources.