Definition
A Latin legal maxim and term of art meaning "without end" or "without limit." In legal usage, *infinitum* appears most commonly as the operative word in the maxim *infinitum in jure reprobatur* — that which is endless is reprobated (rejected) in law. The principle reflects a foundational policy against proceedings, obligations, or chains of legal reasoning that have no defined termination point. Courts and legal writers have invoked it primarily to condemn interminable litigation, but the underlying policy extends to any legal construction that would produce an indefinite, self-perpetuating result.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Ad infinitum* means continuing forever or indefinitely; without limit or end.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To infinity; without limit or end."
The common meaning and the legal meaning point in the same direction — the word simply means "without end." The legal significance lies not in any departure from common meaning but in the maxim's normative force: the common usage is descriptive, while the legal usage is condemnatory. In law, *infinitum* is not a neutral descriptor but a label for something the legal system will not permit to stand.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively encountered in its maxim form — *infinitum in jure reprobatur* — rather than as a standalone doctrine. Researchers encountering the phrase in older pleadings, judicial opinions, or treatises should understand it as a shorthand invocation of finality policy rather than a reference to a named cause of action or procedural rule.
The maxim was applied with particular frequency to two contexts: (1) challenges to pleadings or arguments that would generate endless chains of legal consequence with no logical stopping point, and (2) objections to litigation that threatened to be self-renewing or interminable in practice. When Coke's *Reports* (12 Co. 24) invokes the phrase, it is functioning as a policy anchor — a statement that the common law refuses to follow reasoning to an absurd or boundless conclusion.
Researchers working in early modern English legal materials should be alert to the maxim appearing without translation or gloss; period readers were expected to know it. In later American sources, it appears more rarely and often only in scholarly or appellate writing that is self-consciously drawing on common law tradition. Its absence from most modern indices and digests means it may be missed in keyword searches unless the researcher also searches Latin variants.
The maxim connects meaningfully to related doctrines of finality — res judicata, the rule against perpetuities, and limits on the divisibility of property interests — though *infinitum in jure reprobatur* is not the doctrinal source of those rules. It is better understood as expressing the common principle underlying them.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary shelf source with a substantive entry. His treatment is characteristically compact: he supplies the Latin roots, the translation, the maxim, and the Coke citation in a few lines. The entry is reliable as far as it goes but does not elaborate on the range of contexts in which the maxim was deployed, nor does it distinguish between the maxim's procedural applications (attacks on pleadings) and its substantive policy applications (limits on legal reasoning).
No contradictions appear across available sources because the term has a single settled meaning. The risk for researchers is not conflicting authority but simply the sparseness of modern treatment — later dictionaries largely absorbed the maxim into entries on *res judicata*, finality, or perpetuities without preserving the Latin formulation.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Maxims of Law; Res Judicata and Claim Preclusion; Rule Against Perpetuities.