Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law meaning to spoil, rob, or plunder. In legal usage, expilare referred specifically to the wrongful taking or pillaging of property belonging to an inheritance — that is, goods forming part of a decedent's estate before it had been formally accepted by an heir. The offense was distinct from ordinary theft (furtum) because the property of an unadministered inheritance (hereditas jacens) occupied an ambiguous legal status: it belonged to no living person, and Roman law developed special rules and remedies to address depredations against it. Those who committed expilatio were regarded as more aggravated offenders than common thieves — expilantes sunt atrociores fures (plunderers of inheritances are more atrocious than thieves).
Common Confusion
Expilare is sometimes loosely equated with furtum (theft) in general Roman law discussions, but the two are legally distinct. Furtum required a living owner whose possession or ownership was violated. Expilare applied where the estate had not yet vested in an heir, meaning the wrongdoer could not technically be prosecuted under the standard theft action. Roman law addressed this gap with a separate action — the actio in factum for expilatio — available under the Digest provisions governing this offense. Researchers working in Roman law or civilian tradition sources should not assume that passages discussing theft (furtum) will cover expilatio, and vice versa.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow term of Roman civil law with no direct common law counterpart, and its significance in the Law Mind corpus is almost entirely historical and comparative. Several research considerations apply:
Corpus placement. Expilare and its noun form expilatio appear primarily in treatises on Roman law, civil law commentaries, and historical digests. Researchers encountering the term in English legal sources are likely reading works with heavy civilian influence — Scottish institutional writers, early American treatises drawing on Roman foundations, or comparative law scholarship.
Jurisdictional transmission. The concept passed into civilian legal systems through the Corpus Juris Civilis. Civil law jurisdictions influenced by Roman inheritance law (Louisiana, Quebec, and most of continental Europe) developed their own successor doctrines governing interference with estates prior to acceptance. Common law jurisdictions generally resolved the same problem through the law of executors, administrators, and the personal representative's standing to sue — not through any analog to expilatio.
Source navigation. The term is keyed to two specific locations in Justinian's compilation: Digest 47.19 (on expilatio hereditatis) and Code 9.32. Researchers working with the Digest directly should begin there. Burrill and both editions of Black's point to the same sources and provide substantively identical definitions — the entries offer no independent analysis and should be treated as index markers pointing back to the primary Roman sources rather than as interpretive authorities.
Historical trap. Because expilatio addressed property with no living owner at the moment of taking, some historical commentators situated it awkwardly between theft and a sui generis wrong. Researchers should be cautious about treating civilian discussions of expilatio as directly analogous to common law conversion or trespass to goods, which require interference with another's possessory right — a concept that maps imperfectly onto a vacant inheritance.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — provide materially identical entries: a brief gloss (to spoil, rob, or plunder), the note that the term applies to inheritances, and citations to Digest 47.19 and Code 9.32. Burrill adds nothing beyond Black's, and the two Black's editions are verbatim copies of one another on this point. The Latin maxim expilantes sunt atrociores fures (plunderers are more atrocious than thieves), drawn from Digest 47.18.1.1, appears only in the first edition of Black's and is absent from Burrill and the second edition — a minor but notable variation suggesting some editorial compression between editions.
None of the historical dictionaries explain the doctrinal reason expilatio was treated separately from furtum (the unadministered estate's ambiguous ownership status), nor do they describe the specific Roman remedy. For substantive understanding, researchers must go beyond the dictionary entries to the Digest text itself or to systematic civilian treatises.
Jurisdictional Note
Expilare is a Roman civil law term with no recognized equivalent in English common law. Its doctrinal relevance is confined to jurisdictions whose private law descended from Roman sources or that incorporated civilian inheritance doctrine. In common law systems, interference with estate property is addressed through the rights of executors and administrators, not through any dedicated concept of expilatio.