Definition
Capable of being bequeathed by will. A thing is legable if it may lawfully be the subject of a legacy — that is, if it may be transferred to another person through a testamentary disposition. The term describes the quality of property or an interest that makes it eligible to pass under a will.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Capable of being bequeathed.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed.
The common and legal meanings are essentially identical here, but the term itself is rare enough outside legal usage that it functions almost exclusively as a term of art. Most modern writers would say "bequeathable" or simply describe property as capable of being devised or bequeathed rather than use "legable" at all.
Common Confusion
LEGABLE vs. DEVISABLE: These terms are often treated as interchangeable, but historically they are not. "Devisable" refers to real property capable of passing by will; "legable" refers to personal property capable of being bequeathed as a legacy. The distinction tracks the older divide between devise (real property) and bequest or legacy (personal property). As that divide has largely collapsed in modern statutes — many jurisdictions now use "devise" to cover all testamentary transfers — the practical distinction between legable and devisable has eroded, but the terms may retain their technical meanings in older instruments and historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
"Legable" is a rare term even in legal literature, and a researcher encountering it is almost certainly working in historical sources — English equity reports, early American chancery materials, or treatises predating the twentieth century. Its appearance signals a discussion about whether a particular kind of property or interest could properly be the subject of a legacy, which was a live question in eras when certain property interests (expectancies, future interests, some choses in action) were contested as subjects of testamentary transfer.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is useful precisely because it gestures toward the broader doctrinal neighborhood: the entry cross-references legacies generally, abatement of legacies, the treatment of legacies in wills, and questions about what estates legacies are to be satisfied from. A researcher who finds "legable" in a historical source should immediately expand the search to those surrounding doctrines.
Modern legal databases will return sparse results for this term. Searching for "bequeathable" or "subject to bequest" in combination with the relevant property type will capture the same substantive ground in more recent materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define "legable" concisely as "capable of being bequeathed" — a functional definition that locates the term in the law of testamentary transfer without further elaboration. The entry's value lies less in its definition than in its cross-references to the law of legacies, which signal the doctrinal context in which questions of legability arose: what property could be given by will, how legacies abated when the estate was insufficient, and how courts of equity construed testamentary language.
No other source dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers this term. Historical English dictionaries are silent or nearly so. The term appears to have been a working term of English equity practice that was absorbed into early American legal usage without ever achieving wide independent circulation. Researchers should treat any definition they find as descriptive of practice rather than as a term with a rich doctrinal history of its own.
Jurisdictional Note
No significant modern jurisdictional variation exists because the term itself has fallen out of active use. Where it appears in historical American sources, it reflects English equity practice as received in the relevant jurisdiction. Researchers working in Louisiana should be cautious: the civil law tradition uses distinct vocabulary for testamentary transfers, and "legable" as a term of art from common law equity will not map cleanly onto Louisiana succession law.