Definition
A Latin term from Roman and civil law meaning "to remove from one place to another; to migrate or emigrate." In legal usage, migrare carries a precise consequence: departure from a domicile was not merely a physical act but a legally operative one that triggered the loss of rights, privileges, and immunities attached to the prior domicile. The maxim associated with the term — migrans jura amittat ac privilegia et immunitates domicilii prioris — states that one who emigrates forfeits the rights, privileges, and immunities of the former domicile.
The term appears in civil law contexts addressing the legal effects of a change of domicile, not simply the physical movement itself.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Migrate" means to move from one region or habitat to another, often seasonally or in search of better conditions. Applied broadly to people, animals, and data.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To migrate" is to remove from one country or region to another, with the intent of residing in the new location.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. In ordinary usage, migration describes movement and carries no automatic legal consequence. In the civil law tradition from which migrare derives, the act of removal from a domicile was itself a legal trigger — the emigrant did not merely leave a place but forfeited specific legal entitlements attached to that place. The legal concept is therefore less about travel than about the severance of a jurisdictional bond.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering migrare in historical legal sources should treat it as a domicile term, not a general mobility term. Its significance lies in the maxim it anchors: migrans jura amittat. This principle was foundational to civil law discussions of domicile, conflict of laws, and the portability (or non-portability) of legal status across jurisdictions.
The Burrill entry connects migrare directly to Voet's Commentaries on the Pandects and Kent's Commentaries, placing the term squarely in the early American reception of civil law conflict-of-laws doctrine. Researchers working on nineteenth-century American law — particularly domicile disputes, inheritance questions, or the legal status of persons moving between states — will find this maxim cited as authority for the proposition that domicile-based rights do not travel with the person.
A research trap: do not conflate migrare with mere physical movement. Historical sources using the term presuppose an intent to change domicile permanently. Courts and treatise writers of the period distinguished between temporary absence and true migration, and the maxim only applied to the latter. Sources that cite migrans jura amittat without qualification may be obscuring a contested question of whether the departure was legally sufficient to constitute a change of domicile at all.
The term also surfaces in discussions of feudal and municipal law contexts, where guild membership, citizenship rights, and local privileges were domicile-dependent. In those settings, migrare could mean the total forfeiture of a person's legal standing in a community — a consequence far more severe than anything the modern word "migrate" suggests.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source covering this term, and its entry is compact but well-anchored. Burrill supplies both the Latin definition and the operative maxim, citing Voet's Commentaries on the Pandects (tom. i. 347) and Kent's Commentaries (1 Kent's Com. 76) — a pairing that reflects the dual civil law and early American common law lineage of the concept.
What Burrill does not do is distinguish the conditions under which the forfeiture maxim applied or address the competing view that some privileges of domicile might survive a change of residence under certain circumstances. Civil law jurists debated the reach of this rule, and Voet himself was not without qualification. Researchers relying solely on Burrill's entry will get the black-letter maxim but not the jurisprudential complexity surrounding it.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — not Black's, not Bouvier's — appear to have carried a dedicated entry for migrare, reflecting its status as a term of art that migrated into American legal discourse through treatise citation rather than through common law practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The migrare maxim derives from civil law and entered American law primarily through Kent's Commentaries and treatise literature, not through English common law. Its direct doctrinal force varied by state depending on whether courts drew on civil law domicile principles. Louisiana, with its civil law heritage, would have encountered this principle most directly; common law states absorbed it indirectly through conflict-of-laws doctrine.