Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law meaning to try one's right by legal action; to sue; to pursue a remedy through formal judicial process. The term denoted the act of testing or asserting a legal claim before a tribunal — the initiation and prosecution of legal proceedings to vindicate a right. It appears in Justinian's Institutes in contexts describing when and how a party was entitled to bring an action, and was used interchangeably with related phrases such as judicio experiri (to try by judicial proceeding) and actione experiri (to try by action).
Why It Matters in Research
EXPERIRI is a term of art belonging to Roman and civil law scholarship rather than the common law tradition. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in: (1) Latin texts of the Corpus Juris Civilis and translations thereof; (2) civil law treatises and commentaries drawing on the Institutes or Digest; (3) English legal dictionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries that incorporated Roman law vocabulary, particularly those aimed at chancery and admiralty practitioners who worked in jurisdictions retaining civilian influence.
The term carries navigational significance for corpus researchers because it indexes a cluster of conceptually related materials on the Roman law of actions — specifically, who could bring an action, on what grounds, and before which tribunal. Its presence in a source text is a reliable signal that the author is working within a civil law framework or is translating Roman procedure into a common law or mixed-jurisdiction context.
Researchers should note that EXPERIRI does not map cleanly onto any single English common law equivalent. It encompasses elements of what common lawyers would separately describe as standing to sue, the right of action, and the commencement of proceedings. Sources that use the term loosely may conflate procedural capacity with substantive entitlement — a distinction that matters greatly in historical research on the development of the forms of action.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: "To sue; to try one's right by law," with citations to Justinian's Institutes at 2.6.9, 4.6.40, and 4.11 pr., and a reference to Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum for the equivalence with judicio and actione. Burrill's treatment is accurate but spare — characteristically, it supplies the textual anchors without elaborating on the procedural significance of the term within Roman law or its downstream influence on civilian-influenced American jurisdictions such as Louisiana.
Historical legal dictionaries as a class tend to treat EXPERIRI as a pass-through Latin gloss rather than a term requiring substantive analysis. Researchers relying solely on dictionary support will miss the richer doctrinal context available in the Institutes themselves and in civilian commentators such as Gaius, whose discussion of the actiones and their prerequisites gives EXPERIRI its full operational meaning. The Calvinus cross-reference in Burrill is worth pursuing: the Lexicon Juridicum (various editions, 17th–18th centuries) provides more extensive synonymy and variant usage across legal Latin sources.
Jurisdictional Note
EXPERIRI belongs to the Roman and civil law tradition and has no formal standing in common law jurisdictions. It retains practical relevance in jurisdictions with deep civilian roots — notably Louisiana, Quebec, and Scotland — where courts and scholars have historically engaged with the Institutes directly. In purely common law research contexts, the term appears only in historical, comparative, or academic materials.