JUBAL - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

JUBALAuthored

The Law Mind • 499 words

Definition

"Jubal" does not exist as a legal term. The word appears in Black's Law Dictionary only as a typographical or scanning artifact — the entry beginning "Pertaining to natural or positive right..." belongs to the term JURAL, not "Jubal." No independent legal definition of "Jubal" exists in any recognized legal dictionary, treatise, or body of law.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Jubal is a proper noun — a biblical figure identified as a son of Lamech and Adah, traditionally credited as the ancestor of musicians (Genesis 4:21).

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's identifies Jubal as the same biblical proper name, a personal name with no general English meaning.

Editorial note: There is no gap between common and legal meaning to navigate because "Jubal" has no legal meaning. The appearance of this term in a legal dictionary context is entirely a product of OCR or typesetting error, collapsing "Jural" into a misread form.

Common Confusion

JUBAL vs. JURAL: Any legal source that appears to define "Jubal" is almost certainly a corrupted rendering of JURAL. The letterforms "r" and "b" are susceptible to OCR misreading in scanned historical texts, and the initial "r" in "Jural" can resolve as "b" in low-quality digitization. Researchers encountering "Jubal" in a legal database search should treat the result as a pointer to JURAL and consult that entry directly.

Why It Matters in Research

This entry exists as a navigational correction, not a substantive definition. Researchers working with digitized historical legal texts — including older editions of Black's Law Dictionary available in the Law Mind corpus — may encounter "Jubal" as a search result or index entry due to OCR degradation. If a source appears to define "Jubal" in legal terms, examine the surrounding text: the definition will invariably be the JURAL entry. Do not treat such an occurrence as evidence of an obscure legal term. Searching the Law Mind corpus for "Jubal" in a legal context should be redirected to JURAL before any further research is built on that result. This is a known failure mode of machine-processed historical legal texts and affects usability of scanned dictionary editions more broadly.

Historical Dictionary Support

Black's Law Dictionary is the sole source here, and the entry it contains under what has been rendered "Jubal" is straightforwardly the JURAL definition: pertaining to natural or positive right, pertaining to jurisprudence, or recognized by positive law. There is no independent historical legal authority that treats "Jubal" as a term of art. No other shelf source — Bouvier's, Burrill's, or Stroud's — carries a "Jubal" entry. The absence is itself confirmation that the term is an artifact of transcription error rather than a genuine historical legal concept.

JUBALmain

Black's Law Dictionary • 1891

1. Pertaining to natural or positive right, or to the doctrines of rights and obligations; as "jural relations." 2. Of or pertaining to jurisprudence; ju- ristic; juridical. 3. Recognized or sanctioned by positive law; embraced within, or covered by, the rules and enactments of positive law. Thus, the "jural sphere" is to be distinguished from the "moral sphere;" the latter denoting the whole scope or range of ethics or the science of conduct, the former embracing only such portions of the same as have been made the subject of legal sanction or recog- nition. 4. Founded in law; organized upon the basis of a fundamental law, and existing for the recognition and protection of rights. Thus, the term "jural society" is used as the synonym of "state" or "organized political community." JURAMENTÆ CORPORALES. Cor- JURA PRÆDIORUM. In the civil law. poral oaths, (9. v.) The rights of estates. Dig. 50, 16, 86. Jura publica anteferenda privatis. Public rights are to be preferred to private. Co. Litt. 130a. Applied to protections. Jura publica ex privato [privatis] pro- miscue decidi non debent. Public rights ought not to be decided promiscuously with private. Co. Litt. 130a, 1816.