Definition
A term from Spanish law meaning "preferred" or "advanced" — used to describe an heir or beneficiary who has been favored with a preferential share of an inheritance, typically through a testamentary disposition or legal mechanism allowing a decedent to grant more to one heir than the baseline equal share would otherwise permit. The mejorado is the recipient of a mejora, the grant of preference itself.
Why It Matters in Research
MEJORADO appears in legal research almost exclusively in the context of Spanish colonial law and its successor systems — particularly in jurisdictions that inherited the civil law tradition of Spain, including early American territories such as Texas, California, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Florida. Researchers working with land grants, probate records, inheritance disputes, or family property arrangements from the Spanish colonial period or early statehood era in these regions may encounter the term in original instruments, court opinions, or translated records.
The term cannot be understood in isolation. It is meaningless without its parent concept, the mejora — the testamentary power under Spanish law allowing a testator to allocate up to one-third of the heritable estate preferentially to one or more heirs. The mejorado is simply the designated recipient of that preferential portion. Researchers who encounter the term without recognizing this structural relationship risk misreading the legal significance of the underlying document.
Because these concepts operated within a civil law inheritance framework fundamentally different from English common law, American courts applying Spanish law in early territorial and statehood cases had to grapple with how to translate mejora principles into Anglo-American legal categories. Researchers should be alert to the possibility that court opinions from the nineteenth century may handle these terms inconsistently or translate them imprecisely.
White's New Recopilacion, cited across all three source dictionaries, is a foundational reference for Spanish law as applied in early American jurisdictions. Researchers needing authoritative treatment of mejorado in its original legal context should consult that work directly rather than relying solely on dictionary definitions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: mejorado means "preferred; advanced" in Spanish law, with all three entries citing the same passage from White's New Recopilacion (Book 3, Title 10, Chapter 1, Section 4) as authority. The consistency across sources reflects that this was a settled term of art with a fixed meaning, not a contested or evolving concept within legal lexicography.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context. None of the three entries explains the mejora system that gives mejorado its significance, nor do they situate the term within the broader framework of Spanish inheritance law — the division of the estate into the tercio de mejora, the quinto (the freely disposable fifth), and the legítima (the compulsory heir's share). The bare translation "preferred; advanced" is technically accurate but practically thin for a researcher trying to apply the concept.
Jurisdictional Note
MEJORADO is a term of Spanish civil law and has no application in common law jurisdictions without Spanish colonial history. Its relevance in the United States is largely confined to historical legal materials from states formerly under Spanish sovereignty. Modern civil law jurisdictions derived from Spanish law (including several Latin American countries) may use related terminology, though current practice varies by national code.