Definition
In legal usage, *instant* carries two related but distinct senses:
1. **A point in time.** At common law, an instant is an indivisible moment — a mathematical point on the timeline rather than a measurable duration. The law sometimes treats certain events (death and inheritance passing, offer and acceptance, birth and legal capacity) as occurring at a single instant rather than across a span of time, even when physical reality is more complicated.
2. **The present; the current matter.** Used as an adjective in legal writing and pleading, *instant* means "now before the court" or "currently under consideration." Phrases like "the instant case," "the instant action," and "the instant defendant" are common in judicial opinions and briefs. This usage is a contraction of the older Latin sense of *instans* — pressing, immediate, at hand.
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Common Language
**Modern common usage (Wiktionary):** A very short period of time; a moment. Also, a single precise point in time. Colloquially extended to instant coffee, instant camera, and similar pre-processed goods.
**Historical common usage (Webster's 1913):** Pressing; urgent; importunate. Also, closely impending in respect to time; immediate. Also, present; current.
**Editorial note:** The gap between ordinary and legal usage is real but subtle. In common speech, an *instant* is simply a very brief period — functionally equivalent to "a moment." In law, the term has been pressed to mean something more precise and more fictive: a point without duration at all, used to resolve problems of simultaneity and succession. When a lawyer writes "the instant case," the term is doing different work still — it is a shorthand for "the case now before this court," preserving the Latin sense of *instans* (pressing; at hand) that has largely vanished from ordinary English.
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Common Confusion
**Instant vs. moment.** In ordinary and even in much legal writing, *instant* and *moment* are used interchangeably to mean a short period of time. But classical legal doctrine — particularly as applied to inheritance, vesting, and survival — treated an *instant* as having no duration whatsoever. Under this strict view, two events cannot both occur "at the same instant" unless the law deliberately deems them simultaneous. The distinction matters most in problems of simultaneous death, concurrent conditions, and the fiction of instantaneous transmission of title. Modern legal usage has largely abandoned the strict philosophical sense, but historical sources and equity treatises invoke it directly.
**"The instant case" vs. "the present case."** These phrases mean the same thing. *Instant* in this construction is a Latinism; *present* is the plain-English equivalent. Researchers reading older opinions may encounter both without difference in meaning.
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Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of *instant* creates a navigational challenge in historical sources. When Burrill, Coke, or Plowden use *instant*, they are usually invoking the philosophical doctrine of the indivisible time-point — a doctrine with real doctrinal consequences for succession law, vesting of estates, and the fiction of simultaneous acts. When a twentieth-century judge writes "the instant plaintiff," the word is a stylistic holdover with no philosophical weight.
Researchers working in property law, wills and estates, or conflict of laws should be attentive to the strict-point-of-time usage in equity and common law materials. The doctrine that title passes at an "instant" — so that no gap exists between a grantor's death and the heir's seisin — underlies a range of fictions about continuous ownership, merger, and the avoidance of escheat.
In pleading research, "the instant case/action/motion" appears with high frequency in American judicial opinions from the nineteenth century onward and is essentially a formulaic substitute for "this case." It carries no substantive legal content and should not be confused with the temporal doctrine.
Historical corpus searches on *instant* will return a mix of both usages. Context — particularly surrounding words like *seisin*, *descent*, *vesting*, or *simultaneously* — reliably signals the philosophical-legal sense.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives the classical definition: an indivisible point in time (*unum indivisibile in tempore*), drawing on Cowell and referencing Plowden. The Latin gloss is illuminating — the old logicians distinguished an *instant* from *time* itself and from any *part* of time, treating it instead as the joint or boundary between parts of time. Burrill's source chain (Cowell → Plowden → Coke) reflects the civilian philosophical inheritance that English common law absorbed through its equity and property traditions.
What Burrill does not cover is the adjectival usage — "the instant case" — which was already standard in legal writing by the nineteenth century. Webster's 1913 captures the transitional sense well: *instant* as an adjective meant "present; current" as well as "pressing; immediate," preserving the Latin root without the metaphysical freight.
No standard historical legal dictionary gives adequate treatment to how the strict philosophical definition was operationalized in specific doctrines (simultaneous death, instantaneous seisin, etc.). Researchers needing that level of analysis must move from the dictionary to treatises on real property and equity.
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Jurisdictional Note
The adjectival usage ("the instant case") is universal across common law jurisdictions and carries no jurisdictional variation. The strict point-of-time doctrine was a feature of English common law inherited broadly across American jurisdictions; its modern remnants appear most distinctly in Uniform Simultaneous Death Act provisions and related state statutes, which vary in detail across states.
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