Definition
A Latin term carrying two distinct but historically documented meanings in legal usage:
1. (General legal Latin) To be lawful; to be permitted or allowed by law. Used in legal maxims and civil law texts to express the condition of something being legally permissible — as distinguished from what is merely tolerated, merely possible, or affirmatively required.
2. (Roman law, also rendered LICERI) To offer a price for a thing; to bid at an auction or sale. In the context of Roman commercial and procedural law, licere described the act of a prospective buyer tendering a bid, particularly in public sales or judicial auctions.
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Common Confusion
The two meanings of licere are etymologically related but functionally distinct, and their conflation in legal reading is easy. The first meaning — lawfulness — connects to the broad family of Latin terms governing permission and right (licitum, licentia, licit). The second meaning — bidding — is a narrower, technical Roman law usage appearing specifically in auction and sale contexts. A reader encountering licere in a maxim or general civil law discussion is almost certainly dealing with the first meaning; a reader encountering licere or liceri in a text concerning venditio, emptio, or judicial sale is almost certainly dealing with the second. Historical dictionaries frequently list both under the same entry without clearly flagging how different the operative contexts are.
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Why It Matters in Research
Licere in its first sense is foundational to understanding the structure of permissive language in civil law and mixed jurisdictions. Many Latin maxims use licere or its derivatives to distinguish between what the law permits, what it forbids, and what it commands — a tripartite structure that matters in reading Roman law sources, canon law texts, and early common law commentary that borrowed civilian vocabulary. Researchers working in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed jurisdictions will encounter this vocabulary in sources where the permissive/mandatory/prohibitory distinction carries substantive legal weight.
The bidding sense of licere (liceri) is most relevant to researchers working in Roman law proper, particularly on topics of auction sales, emptio venditio, and the procedural mechanics of execution sales in classical sources. It appears in texts concerning the sectio bonorum and missio in bona, where creditors or buyers offered bids through a formal process. This usage is historically confined and is unlikely to appear outside Roman law scholarship or texts directly translating or glossing classical sources.
A practical trap in corpus research: because historical legal dictionaries sometimes run licere into nearby entries without clean breaks — as visible in the Black's 2nd edition entry above, which opens mid-sentence from a prior entry about intoxicating liquor licenses — researchers scanning digitized sources may encounter licere in corrupted or misattributed textual contexts. The 2nd edition entry's garbled opening ("kind of intoxicating HMquor") is an OCR and typesetting artifact, not a third meaning of the term.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's are in full agreement on both core meanings, all attributing the lawfulness definition to Calvin's Lexicon (Calvinus, Lexicon Juridicum) — a standard reference for legal Latin in this period. No source diverges on substance. The Burrill entry is truncated in the available text but tracks the same structure.
None of the three historical sources elaborate meaningfully on either meaning beyond bare definition. They do not explain the relationship between licere and the cognate terms licitum or licentia, and they do not cross-reference the bidding sense to specific Roman law contexts (such as the subhastatio or bonorum emptio), leaving that work to the researcher consulting primary civil law sources directly.
The brevity of the historical entries is itself informative: licere was treated as a lookup term, a point of entry into the Latin vocabulary of permission, not as a concept requiring extended doctrinal exposition. Researchers needing substantive analysis of what lawfulness meant in a given civil law context will need to move beyond these dictionary entries to institutional treatises on Roman law.
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