Definition
In another's right. A Latin-French (Law French) maxim describing the legal capacity in which a person acts not for themselves but on behalf of, or in the right of, another. When someone holds property, pursues a claim, or exercises a legal power in auter droit, they do so in a representative or fiduciary capacity — their authority and interest derive entirely from another person, not from any personal right of their own.
The term is most commonly encountered in the law of trusts, agency, and property, where it distinguishes a representative capacity (executor, trustee, guardian, attorney-in-fact) from a personal one. An executor suing to recover assets of the estate acts in auter droit — in the right of the deceased and the beneficiaries — not in his own right. The same logic applies to a trustee managing trust property, or a guardian acting for a ward.
Common Confusion
IN AUTER DROIT and IN AUTRE DROIT: This entry and its preferred form EN AUTRE DROIT represent the same concept across variant spellings common in Law French sources. Burrill himself flags that IN AUTER DROIT is the less precise rendering and directs readers to EN AUTRE DROIT as the canonical form. Researchers encountering either spelling in historical sources should treat them as equivalent. The variation reflects the instability of Law French orthography across centuries of English legal writing, not a distinction in meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research challenge with IN AUTER DROIT is orthographic: the phrase appears in historical sources under multiple spellings — in auter droit, en autre droit, in autre droit — with no consistent standard across centuries of legal writing. A search that captures only one spelling will miss appearances of the others. Researchers working in equity records, probate materials, or early property law reports should run variant-spelling searches as a matter of course.
The concept itself is foundational to understanding how courts historically analyzed conflicts of interest and capacity. When a fiduciary acts in auter droit, classical common law treated their personal creditors as having no claim against property held in that representative capacity — the property was not theirs to encumber. This principle surfaces repeatedly in early equity opinions and has obvious relevance to the modern law of trusts and asset protection, but the connecting terminology in historical sources is the Law French form, not modern equivalents. Researchers tracing the doctrinal genealogy of trustee immunity or fiduciary insulation will find in auter droit a recurring marker worth tracking.
The term also appears in older agency and corporate law materials, particularly in discussions of ultra vires acts and the question of whether an agent's act binds the principal. Understanding that the agent acts in auter droit — and only in auter droit — helps explain why historical courts limited the personal liability and personal benefit of agents acting in a representative capacity.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only direct treatment in the available sources, and it is notably brief — essentially a redirect to EN AUTRE DROIT, which Burrill treats as the proper form. Burrill's terse entry accurately conveys the phrase's meaning ("in another's right") and appropriately signals the spelling variant without elaborating on doctrine. The brevity is characteristic of how Law French maxims were handled in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries: the compilers assumed practitioners would recognize the concept and need only the translation. Modern researchers, however, may encounter the phrase without that background, making the redirect to a fuller entry both necessary and telling. What Burrill does not provide — and what no historical dictionary in this corpus fully develops — is a systematic account of the contexts in which the in auter droit / en autre droit distinction drove outcomes. That doctrinal content must be reconstructed from treatises on trusts and equity rather than from dictionary sources alone.
Jurisdictional Note
The concept operates across common law jurisdictions wherever fiduciary and representative capacities are legally recognized, which is universal in Anglo-American law. The Law French label itself has fallen out of active use in modern American practice, replaced by plain-English equivalents in statutes and judicial opinions, but the underlying doctrine remains live and the historical label persists in older authorities.