Definition
In Roman civil law, *lana* is the Latin term for wool. It appears in legal contexts as a commodity subject to bequest, legacy, and inheritance disputes — specifically in the Digest of Justinian, where jurists addressed questions about what fell within the scope of a testamentary gift that included wool or wool-related goods.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The tree *Genipa americana*, a tropical fruit tree native to the Americas, also known as the genip or jagua.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as an English word in Webster's 1913; *lana* in that period would have been recognized primarily as a Latin or Spanish word for wool.
The gap here is complete. The Wiktionary entry reflects a botanical use of *lana* as a vernacular plant name — wholly unrelated to the Roman civil law term. A researcher encountering *lana* in a legal source should not be misled by the botanical meaning, which postdates and is geographically and conceptually remote from the Roman law usage.
Why It Matters in Research
*Lana* is a narrow technical term that surfaces almost exclusively in primary Roman law materials and in dictionaries or treatises that draw directly on civil law sources. Researchers encountering the word in translated or untranslated passages of the Corpus Juris Civilis — particularly the Digest — should treat it as a commodity designation with potentially significant legal weight: the classical jurists debated whether *lana* in a legacy encompassed raw fleece only, or extended to processed wool, thread, or cloth. Those interpretive disputes are what Digest books 32 and adjacent passages address.
The term has no meaningful life in Anglo-American common law. If *lana* appears in an English-language legal document, it is either a direct quotation from a civil law source, a term used by a civilian-trained jurist, or an artifact of a jurisdiction with a strong Roman law inheritance (e.g., Scotland, Louisiana, South Africa, or historical Spanish territories). In those contexts, do not assume the common law framework applies.
Researchers working in ecclesiastical law, maritime law, or early commercial law may also encounter commodity-specific Latin terms alongside *lana*; the methodology for interpreting them is the same — go to the Digest directly, or to a reliable civilian commentary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: *lana* means wool in the civil law, and all three sources point to Digest 32 (specifically passages 60, 70, and 88) as the operative locus. There is no divergence among the shelf sources on meaning, and none of them expand beyond the bare definition and citation. Burrill adds the slight gloss that the word is "construed" in those passages — a useful pointer indicating that the term's scope was itself a matter of juristic interpretation, not merely a neutral label.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any substantive account of what the Digest actually says about *lana* — what was included or excluded from a bequest of wool, and on what reasoning. Researchers should consult the Digest directly or a commentary in the civilian tradition for that substance.