Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "in suffering, permitting, or allowing." Used in property and obligations law to characterize a passive role — the situation in which a party tolerates or allows something to occur on their land or through their rights, as opposed to actively doing or granting something. The phrase most commonly appears in the context of easements and servitudes, where the law distinguishes between obligations requiring active performance and those satisfied merely by forbearance or passive permission.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase surfaces almost exclusively in the law of easements and real covenants, where courts and treatises use it as part of a three-part classification drawn from Roman and common law: obligations *in faciendo* (requiring active doing), obligations *in non faciendo* (requiring abstention), and obligations *in patiendo* (requiring passive sufferance or permission). Researchers tracing the enforceability of equitable servitudes or the running of covenants at law will encounter this terminology most often in older English cases and in treatises on real property from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A key research trap: modern American courts rarely use the Latin phrase itself, having absorbed the underlying distinction into the general vocabulary of affirmative versus negative easements and covenants. If you encounter *in patiendo* in a case or argument, it almost certainly signals a source with English common law roots or a heavily treatise-influenced analysis. When searching the Law Mind corpus, expect the phrase to cluster in property law materials and equity treatises rather than in procedural or criminal sources.
The distinction between *in patiendo* and *in faciendo* carries substantive consequence. At common law, courts were far more willing to enforce obligations of passive sufferance against successors in title than affirmative obligations requiring active expenditure or effort. This asymmetry helps explain why certain easements and negative covenants ran with land more readily than affirmative covenants — a tension that persists in modern American servitudes law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's — define *in patiendo* identically: "in suffering, permitting, or allowing." The uniformity is notable but not surprising; this is a term of art with a fixed Latin meaning, and none of the sources depart from the core translation. What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context: none of the three entries explains the doctrinal role the phrase plays, the tripartite classification it belongs to, or the consequences that flow from categorizing an obligation as *in patiendo* rather than *in faciendo*. Researchers relying solely on the dictionary entries will have the translation but not the analytical framework. Bouvier's broader treatment of easements elsewhere in the dictionary provides useful adjacent context that the standalone entry lacks.