Definition
Latin. "In open daylight"; in the daytime. A phrase used in early common law to describe acts or conditions occurring in open, visible daylight hours, as distinguished from acts committed at night. The phrase appears most commonly in historical English legal discourse concerning the time at which a wrongful act was committed, where the distinction between day and night carried legal consequences — particularly in the law of burglary and related offenses, where nighttime commission was an aggravating element.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry. The phrase is Latin and not part of ordinary modern English usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The phrase remained confined to legal and ecclesiastical Latin even in the nineteenth century.
The phrase has no meaningful common English life. It is pure law Latin, meaningful only within the technical legal context of distinguishing daytime from nighttime acts.
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Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a navigational marker, not a substantive legal doctrine. Researchers encountering in aperta luce in historical English or American legal sources are almost always working with material that concerns time-of-day distinctions with legal consequences — most frequently early burglary doctrine, where the common law definition of burglary required the breaking and entering to occur in the nighttime. Daytime housebreaking was treated as a lesser offense, and the phrase in aperta luce served to locate conduct outside the nighttime requirement.
The phrase appears in Mackalley's Case (9 Co. Rep. 65b), a seventeenth-century English report, and its appearances in American legal dictionaries are almost entirely derivative of that single citation. Researchers should not expect to find the phrase in American case law with any frequency; its presence in Bouvier, Burrill, and both editions of Black's signals its importance as a term of art in historical English common law materials rather than American practice.
A trap for researchers: the phrase can appear in historical treatises discussing property, criminal law, or servitudes. In each context, the underlying legal significance is the same — daylight visibility or daytime occurrence — but the doctrinal stakes differ. In property and servitudes contexts, in aperta luce occasionally describes the open and notorious character of a use or condition, invoking visibility rather than merely clock time. Researchers working in adverse possession or easement-by-prescription materials in early sources should read the phrase in that contextual register.
Because the phrase does not survive into modern American legal usage, researchers tracing a doctrine through time should pivot from the Latin phrase to its English equivalents — "in the daytime," "during daylight hours," or "open and notorious" — when crossing into nineteenth- and twentieth-century American authorities.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (both editions), Burrill, and Bouvier — define the phrase identically: "in open daylight; in the daytime." Each traces the phrase to 9 Co. Rep. 65b (Mackalley's Case). There is no divergence among the sources on core meaning.
Burrill adds the identifying case name (Mackalley's Case), which is the single useful addition across the four entries. None of the dictionaries elaborates on the doctrinal contexts in which the phrase operated or distinguishes between its criminal-law and property-law applications. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries as signposts to Coke's Reports rather than as self-contained explanations.
The consistency across dictionaries reflects the phrase's narrow, stable function: it was never a contested or evolving term, but rather a fixed Latin tag for a simple factual condition.
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Jurisdictional Note
This phrase has no meaningful jurisdictional variation in American law because it did not take root in American legal usage as a term of art. Its significance is effectively limited to English common law sources predating American independence and to American legal dictionaries that absorbed those sources directly.
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