Definition
In civil law, homonymie refers to the condition arising when a legal rule or statute was repeated — stated in the same terms or to substantially the same effect — in more than one place within the body of law. The term denotes instances of iteration and redundancy in legal texts, particularly within the Roman legal corpus and its derived systems. It is not a doctrine governing conflicting laws but rather a descriptive label for legislative or editorial duplication.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In general English and linguistics, "homonymy" refers to the relationship between two words that share the same spelling or pronunciation but carry different meanings (e.g., "bank" as a financial institution and "bank" as a riverbank).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's defines the related form "homonymy" as the quality of being homonymous — of having the same name while denoting different things.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. In ordinary usage, homonymy concerns words with identical form but divergent meanings — the problem of ambiguity. In civil law usage, homonymie addresses the opposite situation: legal texts that say the same thing more than once — the problem of redundancy. A researcher encountering this term in a legal context should resist the instinct to apply its linguistic meaning.
Common Confusion
Homonymie is easily confused with antinomia (the condition of conflicting or contradictory laws) and with ambiguitas (ambiguity in legal texts). These are distinct problems. Antinomia involves laws that cannot both be applied; homonymie involves laws that say the same thing twice. Ambiguitas involves uncertainty of meaning in a single text; homonymie involves clarity of meaning across duplicated texts. A compiler or commentator addressing homonymie is not resolving a contradiction — they are noting a redundancy.
Why It Matters in Research
Homonymie is a term of art drawn from the vocabulary of civil law commentary and is most likely to appear in annotated editions of Roman law sources, treatises on the Digest or Code of Justinian, and works of comparative jurisprudence from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Researchers should be alert to several navigational points.
First, the term appears in James Kent's Commentaries on American Law, specifically in a footnote to the second volume, where Kent discusses problems of legislative repetition in the context of statutory construction. This connection makes homonymie occasionally relevant to early American common law scholarship, even though the concept is Roman in origin.
Second, the term surfaces in historical treatises examining how compilers of the Corpus Juris Civilis handled redundant passages — a practical editorial problem given the scale and layered origins of that corpus. In that context, homonymie is less a legal doctrine than a textual criticism concept imported into legal scholarship.
Third, researchers working in French or Continental legal sources should note that the French term "homonymie" carries its ordinary linguistic meaning (words with the same sound but different meanings) in non-legal writing. Context is essential: a French legal commentary using "homonymie" in the Roman law sense will typically be discussing legislative repetition, not linguistic ambiguity.
Fourth, this term has essentially no active presence in modern Anglo-American legal writing. Encountering it in a contemporary source would be unusual and likely signals either a comparative law or a legal history context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary (first and second editions) provide nearly identical definitions, confirming the term's stable if narrow meaning within the legal dictionary tradition. Both editions tie the concept to "cases of iteration and repetition" and both point to Kent's Commentaries, volume 2, page 489, note, as the supporting authority. This cross-reference to Kent is the primary anchor for the term in American legal sources.
The Black's entries are brief and purely descriptive — they offer no doctrinal analysis, no treatment of how homonymie was resolved in practice, and no discussion of its relationship to other interpretive problems. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the textual criticism dimension of the concept: how Roman law compilers and later glossators actually handled repeated passages, whether through omission, consolidation, or cross-reference. Researchers needing that depth must look beyond the dictionary tradition to civilian treatises and scholarship on the Digest.
Jurisdictional Note
Homonymie as a legal concept belongs to the civil law tradition and has no independent existence as a doctrine in common law systems. Its appearance in American legal literature is limited to comparative and historical commentary, primarily in the early republic period when scholars like Kent were synthesizing civil and common law sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Roman and Civil Law (for the broader context of Justinianic compilation and its interpretive challenges); Statutory Interpretation (for the general problem of redundancy and surplusage in legislative texts).