Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law denoting a stone quarry. In legal usage, lapidicina appears primarily in the context of usufruct — the right to use and derive benefit from another's property — where the question arose whether a usufructuary could exploit a quarry on land subject to the usufruct. The Digest addressed whether such extraction rights fell within the scope of the usufructuary's lawful enjoyment of the property.
Why It Matters in Research
Lapidicina is a narrow technical term encountered almost exclusively in Roman law sources and civil law scholarship. Researchers are most likely to encounter it when tracing the boundaries of usufruct in civilian jurisdictions or when working with Latin-language legal texts, particularly the Digest of Justinian. The term does not appear in common law sources as a live legal concept; its appearance in Black's and Burrill's reflects those dictionaries' role as reference tools for scholars navigating Roman and civil law materials rather than practitioners applying domestic doctrine.
The Digest citation — Dig. 7, 1, 9, 2 — anchors the term in the title on usufruct (De usufructu), and researchers working in that section of the Digest will encounter lapidicina alongside related questions about mines, pits, and other extractive resources on encumbered land. The core doctrinal question was whether quarrying constituted use of the property in its existing state or an impermissible alteration that exceeded the usufructuary's rights. Understanding this distinction is essential for anyone working with civilian property law, particularly in jurisdictions with Roman law foundations such as Louisiana, Quebec, South Africa, or Scots law.
Researchers should note that lapidicina is not a term of art in modern statutory or common law systems. If encountered in a 19th-century American legal text, it almost certainly signals a writer drawing on civil law tradition for comparative or scholarly purposes rather than citing operative domestic authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Burrill's, and Black's (2nd ed.) — give identical, minimal entries: the Latin designation, the civil law provenance, the English gloss "stone-quarry," and the Digest citation. There is no divergence among the sources and no elaboration beyond that core. None of the three entries places the term in its doctrinal context within usufruct law, which is the setting that gives the word its legal significance. Researchers relying solely on these dictionary entries will understand what the word means as a matter of translation but will miss why it appears in the legal record at all. The Digest passage itself, consulted directly, is more instructive than any of the dictionary treatments.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Usufruct; Roman Law Property; Mines and Minerals (Civil Law).