Definition
To hide oneself; to conceal one's person from legal process or creditors. In the civil law and older common law practice, latitare described the act of a debtor or defendant who secreted himself to avoid service of process, arrest, or the satisfaction of legal obligations. The term captures deliberate concealment — not mere absence, but active evasion of legal reach.
Common Confusion
Latitare is sometimes loosely equated with simple absence or flight from jurisdiction, but the term carries a more specific connotation: concealment with intent to defraud creditors or defeat legal process. A person who openly removes to another jurisdiction is not latitating. The term implies hiding in place, or at least hiding one's whereabouts, rather than open departure. Researchers should also distinguish latitare from outlawry proper — outlawry was the formal legal consequence that could follow upon a finding that a defendant was latitating; the act and its legal consequence are related but distinct.
Why It Matters in Research
Latitare is a term of art that appears almost exclusively in historical legal sources. Researchers encountering it in older English or civil law materials should understand its procedural context: when a defendant could not be served because he was found to be latitating, courts had mechanisms — including capias, exigent process, and ultimately outlawry — to proceed against him. The term therefore serves as a navigational marker. Its appearance in a document often signals that the underlying record concerns process failure, debtor evasion, or a preliminary step toward outlawry proceedings.
The term is essentially obsolete in modern practice. It will not appear in contemporary statutes or rules. Researchers working in early modern English legal records, ecclesiastical court documents, or civil law treatises (particularly those treating Roman procedure) are most likely to encounter it. In equity practice, the concealment of a defendant could trigger distinct procedural responses, and latitare may appear in chancery materials in that context.
Because the term sits at the intersection of civil process, creditor-debtor law, and criminal procedure (through outlawry), corpus searches should be broadened to capture the surrounding procedural landscape rather than the word alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill defines latitare as hiding or secreting oneself from creditors with a view to defrauding them, placing the term squarely in the civil law tradition. Burrill's entry is brief but accurate in identifying the term's core meaning: deliberate concealment to defeat legal or creditor process.
The etymology embedded in Burrill — from latere, to lie hid — is genuinely instructive here, because it clarifies that the term is descriptive of a physical and intentional act (lying hidden), not merely a legal status. This distinguishes latitare as a behavioral descriptor rather than a term of legal status in its own right.
Historical dictionaries as a class give this term sparse treatment, which reflects its narrow procedural utility. It is not a term that generated significant doctrinal elaboration; it was functional vocabulary in the law of process rather than a concept that courts extensively defined or debated. Researchers should not expect to find latitare as the subject of leading cases. Its significance is procedural and contextual.
Jurisdictional Note
Latitare belongs primarily to the English common law and civil law traditions as they existed before modern procedural codes. It has no recognized counterpart in contemporary American, English, or civil law jurisdictions by name. The underlying concept — evasion of process — is addressed in modern law through rules governing substituted service, publication, and contempt, but without use of this term.