Definition
In ecclesiastical law, a church is said to be litigious when two competing presentations are made to a bishop upon the same avoidance — that is, when two different patrons each claim the right to present a candidate to fill the same vacant benefice. The term describes not a church that is contentious by character, but a benefice that has become the subject of a disputed presentation, placing the bishop in the position of receiving rival claims to the right of appointment.
The condition of a litigious church arose specifically within the system of advowson and patronage that governed the appointment of clergy to parish livings in English ecclesiastical law. When a living fell vacant (the avoidance), the patron holding the advowson had the right to present a clerk to the bishop for institution. If two persons each asserted patronage rights and each tendered a presentation, the living became litigious and the bishop could not lawfully institute either presentee until the dispute was resolved.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Litigious" means inclined to engage in lawsuits; excessively fond of litigation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Litigious" means inclined to engage in lawsuits; contentious; also, subject to contention; in dispute.
The gap here is specific and worth noting. In ordinary use, "litigious" describes a person's disposition. In this ecclesiastical context, it describes a legal status of a church living — not that the church or its congregation is quarrelsome, but that the right to fill the vacant benefice has become legally contested. A researcher encountering "litigious church" in historical sources should not read the word in its common sense.
Common Confusion
The term should not be confused with "disputed presentation" as a general phrase, which may appear in broader ecclesiastical and civil contexts. Litigious church is a term of art signaling a specific procedural posture: two presentations tendered to the bishop on the same avoidance. It is also distinct from a church being in schism or under ecclesiastical censure, conditions that describe the church's internal religious status rather than the patronage dispute that defines a litigious church.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow, historical term of English ecclesiastical law and will appear almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century sources — primarily treatises on advowson, patronage, and church law, and in ecclesiastical court records. Researchers working in English legal history, property law as applied to benefices, or the intersection of common law and canon law should expect to encounter it there.
The patronage and advowson system that generated this term was substantially dismantled in England over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in reforms that curtailed lay patronage rights. The term is therefore effectively obsolete in contemporary legal usage. It will not appear in modern American law at all, as the advowson system was never transplanted to the United States in operative legal form — the First Amendment's religion clauses foreclosed any state mechanism for resolving competing claims to fill a church position through civil adjudication.
For Law Mind corpus researchers, the significance of this term is primarily historical and ecclesiastical. If you encounter it in a legal compendium, digest, or treatise, it is almost certainly an entry carried forward from English ecclesiastical sources. Black's Law Dictionary traces it to Jenkins's Centuries (Jenk. Cent. 11), a collection of common law cases and maxims from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which signals both the term's antiquity and its grounding in the common law treatment of ecclesiastical patronage disputes.
Researchers interested in the downstream constitutional question — how American courts handle competing claims to religious leadership or church property — should move to the church autonomy and ministerial exception doctrine rather than looking for any American analog to the litigious church concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary preserves the term with economy: a church is litigious "where two presentations are offered to the bishop upon the same avoidance," citing Jenkins's Centuries. This is a faithful transmission of the narrow ecclesiastical meaning.
Historical sources broadly agree on this definition because the term never developed beyond this specific technical usage. There is no meaningful divergence among historical dictionaries on the substance of the definition. What historical sources do not address — and what a researcher should supply from context — is the procedural consequence: when a living became litigious, the bishop's ordinary power to institute was suspended pending resolution of the patronage dispute, typically through a writ of right of advowson or quare impedit proceedings in the common law courts. The definition alone, without that procedural backdrop, understates the term's practical significance in the era when it was operative.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is purely English in origin and application. It has no operative legal meaning in any American jurisdiction. Researchers working in English legal history will find it relevant across the periods when advowson was a recognized property right cognizable at common law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Ministerial Exception and Church Autonomy (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia) — for the modern American constitutional framework governing church governance disputes, which occupies the conceptual space that ecclesiastical patronage law once filled in the English system.