Definition
A Latin term from old English legal practice meaning to enact. The term appears in its participial forms as *inactitatus* (masculine) and *inactitatum* (neuter), meaning enacted or having been enacted. In historical legal usage, *inactitare* described the formal act of giving legislative effect to a rule, provision, or authority — the act of making something law.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is of narrow but specific use in historical English legal research, particularly when working with early common law records, writs, and registers. Researchers encountering *inactitatus* or *inactitatum* in Latin legal manuscripts or printed registers should read these as passive participial forms meaning "enacted" — describing something already given legal force, not something in process.
The principal caution for corpus researchers is the risk of misreading the term as a general Latin phrase rather than a technical legal term of art. Because *inactitare* is constructed from the prefix *in-* and the root *actitare* (to drive, urge, or perform repeatedly), it may superficially resemble other Latin legal constructions. Its meaning here, however, is specifically legislative or enactive in character.
The sources cited by Burrill — the Register of Writs appendix, Salkeld's Reports, and Freeman's reports — locate this term firmly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century English legal context. Researchers using printed registers or case reporters from this period may encounter the term in procedural or formulaic contexts where the validity or authority of an enacted rule is at issue.
The term does not persist into modern legal usage. It belongs to the stratum of Law Latin that was actively employed in English court practice before the formal abolition of Latin pleading in the eighteenth century. Any modern appearance of the word would almost certainly be a quotation from or reference to historical sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary entry identified for this term, and its treatment is characteristically spare: a classification (old English law), a translation (to enact), the participial forms with their meanings, and three source citations. No definition beyond the bare gloss is offered.
The citations Burrill supplies are to the Appendix to the Register of Writs (*Registrum Brevium*), Salkeld's Reports at volume 3, and Freeman's Reports — all standard primary sources for late seventeenth and early eighteenth century English legal practice. Burrill does not elaborate on the context in which these sources use the term, and no other historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus supplements this entry. Researchers needing fuller context must go directly to the cited primary sources.
What the historical dictionary record does not provide is any discussion of how *inactitare* related to or differed from other terms describing legislative or enactive acts in the same period. The record is thin, and researchers should treat this as a term of limited but precise meaning rather than one with contested interpretive history.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to historical English legal practice. It has no recognized usage in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions, and carries no statutory or doctrinal significance outside its original English common law context.