Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "in life" or "during life." Used in legal contexts to describe acts, rights, interests, or obligations that exist, arise, or must be exercised while a person is alive — as distinguished from rights or interests that arise only upon or after death. The phrase is most commonly encountered in older common law texts dealing with property, dower, and the legal capacity of persons.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern common law materials — particularly those dealing with dower rights, life estates, and real property conveyances — will encounter *in vita* as a shorthand marker for the temporal boundary between a living person's legal capacity and the rights that crystallize at death. The phrase flags a distinction that runs throughout classical property law: certain acts (such as a husband's alienation of land relevant to dower) were only effective or challengeable *in vita*, meaning during the lifetime of the relevant party.
The phrase appears in Bracton and in the broader tradition of medieval English legal Latin, so researchers using early primary sources should recognize it without needing translation apparatus. Because it functions as a modifier rather than a term of art with a formal doctrinal structure of its own, *in vita* tends to appear embedded within larger legal propositions rather than as a standalone heading — which means it can be easy to pass over in transcription or indexing.
When searching the Law Mind corpus, note that *in vita* and its French equivalent *en vie* were used interchangeably in medieval and early modern sources. Burrill explicitly cross-references these two forms. A search limited to one variant may miss relevant passages in sources that preferred the other. The Latin form dominates in Bracton-era texts; the Anglo-French *en vie* appears more frequently in Year Book materials and later plea rolls.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides a concise and accurate entry, defining the phrase as "in life; alive" and noting its equivalent *en vie*, with a reference to Bracton (fol. 13 b) for the sense "for life." The Bracton citation anchors the phrase firmly in the foundational stratum of English common law learning.
Burrill's entry is minimal by design — *in vita* is a descriptive phrase, not a complex doctrine — and the dictionary correctly treats it as a pointer to related concepts rather than a self-contained term requiring extended analysis. What the entry does not do is explain the practical doctrinal contexts in which the phrase most frequently operated (dower, curtesy, life estates, and capacity to contract or convey), which researchers will need to pursue through the substantive entries for those topics.
The entry that immediately follows *in vita* in Burrill — the passage on a ship's "inability" — is unrelated and reflects only the alphabetical arrangement of the dictionary. Researchers should not read any connection between the two.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Life Estate; Dower; En Vie.