Definition
A Latin term from Roman law meaning to offer a price at a sale; to bid at auction. More specifically, the term carries the sense of repeated or escalating bidding — making several bids, one above another — rather than a single offer. The word functions as a verb of action describing the conduct of a purchaser competing in a public sale.
Common Confusion
LICITARE should not be confused with LICERE, its root verb, which refers more broadly to the lawfulness or permissibility of an act, or in the auction context, to the offering of a thing for sale (the seller's side). LICITARE is the buyer's act — the bidding — while LICERE in the auction sense describes the act of putting something up for bid. Burrill draws this distinction by identifying LICITARE as the frequentative form of LICERE, capturing the iterative quality of competitive bidding.
Why It Matters in Research
LICITARE is a term of Roman law that appears almost exclusively in historical legal sources treating Roman auction procedure. Researchers will encounter it primarily in glossaries, civil law dictionaries, and treatises on Roman private law rather than in Anglo-American case law or statutes. Its significance in the Law Mind corpus is as a vocabulary key: understanding LICITARE unlocks the conceptual framework Roman jurists used to describe competitive bidding, which in turn informs later civil law treatments of auction sales in jurisdictions with Roman-law heritage — notably Louisiana, Quebec, and Scottish law.
The frequentative construction is substantively meaningful, not merely grammatical. Roman legal Latin used frequentative verb forms to distinguish single acts from habitual or repeated ones. LICITARE therefore implies the competitive back-and-forth of an auction — the incremental escalation of bids — rather than a one-time price offer. Researchers reading Roman auction texts should treat this term as describing the full bidding process, not a single moment within it.
Be alert to variant spellings and related forms: LICITATIO (the noun form, meaning the act of bidding or the auction itself) and LICITATOR (one who bids). Primary sources and older dictionaries may use these interchangeably or in close proximity, and conflating them can obscure whether a text is describing the process, the act, or the person.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in full agreement on this term — both supply the same core definition and both cite Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum (Calv. Lex.) as their shared authority. This convergence is typical for Latin Roman-law terms where both dictionaries drew from the same civil law lexicographical tradition.
Burrill adds one structural detail that Black's omits: he identifies LICITARE explicitly as a frequentative of LICERE, which is analytically useful. This grammatical note is not mere pedantry — it explains why the definition emphasizes repeated bidding rather than a single offer, and it connects LICITARE to a broader family of related terms built on the same root.
Neither dictionary provides extended discussion. Both entries are short glosses appropriate to a term whose Roman-law context requires no elaborate elaboration for the civil law practitioner of the nineteenth century. Modern researchers consulting these entries should supplement them with primary Roman law sources and civilian treatises for any substantive analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
LICITARE has no direct application in Anglo-American common law systems. Its relevance is confined to Roman law, classical civil law scholarship, and jurisdictions with Roman-law foundations. Researchers working in Louisiana, Quebec, or comparative law contexts may find the term in historical civilian sources bearing on auction and sale procedure.