Definition
A Latin term meaning "to send" or "to put." In legal usage, mittere functions primarily as a verbal component in compound Latin phrases and maxims rather than as a standalone legal concept. Its meaning shifts depending on context:
1. To send (a person or official). Used in procedural and constitutional contexts to describe the dispatching of a judge, commissioner, or royal officer to exercise authority over a person or territory.
2. To put (into a common fund or stock). Used in property and inheritance contexts to describe the act of contributing assets into a shared pool, as in the doctrine of hotchpot.
3. To put (oneself into land). Used in conveyancing contexts to describe the act of entering or seizing possession of land, as when a grantor authorizes a grantee to enter upon and take possession.
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Common Confusion
Mittere should not be confused with mittimus, a related but distinct Latin term that evolved into a specific writ. Mittimus (from mittimus, "we send") is a formal writ or warrant committing a person to custody or directing the transfer of court records. Mittere is the infinitive form and functions as a component of maxims and phrases; mittimus is a fully developed legal instrument with its own procedural history. The surface similarity causes occasional conflation in older texts and indexes, but the two terms operate in entirely different procedural registers.
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Why It Matters in Research
Mittere will rarely appear as a headword in modern legal sources. Researchers encounter it almost exclusively in two settings: (1) the interpretation of Latin maxims and phrases embedded in older common law texts, statutes, and instruments; and (2) the exegesis of foundational documents such as Magna Carta, where the phrase "nec super eum mittemus" appears in Chapter 29 and carries significant constitutional weight.
The phrase "nec super eum mittemus" — "nor will we send upon him" — is part of the due process guarantee in Magna Carta Chapter 29 (Chapter 39 in the original 1215 text). Coke's commentary in the Second Institutes reads this phrase as a prohibition on the Crown dispatching agents to condemn a free man without lawful judgment of peers. Researchers working on the historical development of due process, procedural rights, or royal prerogative will need to track this phrase through Coke's Institutes and Reeves' History of English Law to understand how later common lawyers constructed its meaning. The phrase is not self-defining, and Burrill's cross-reference to 2 Inst. 46 and 1 Reeves' Hist. 249 provides the essential interpretive path.
The phrase "mittere in confusum" — to put into hotchpot — connects mittere to the law of advancement and contribution in descent and distribution. Blackstone's treatment at 2 Bl. Com. 190 and the Lombard law citation (LL. Longobard. b. 2, tit. 14, c. 15) in Burrill illustrate that this usage has medieval civilian and feudal roots. Researchers working on hotchpot doctrine should recognize that mittere in confusum is the operative Latin formula and that earlier sources may use only the Latin without translation.
The conveyancing usage — "quod me extunc possim in terram illam mittere," meaning that the grantor authorizes the grantee to enter the land — appears in older deed forms and inquisitions. This usage relates to the formal act of livery or entry and is distinct from both the procedural and contribution usages. Researchers working with pre-modern conveyances or title abstracts may encounter this phrasing in original instruments.
Because mittere is a particle of meaning embedded in longer phrases, keyword searching in digitized historical texts will return useful results only when the full phrase is used as the search string. Searching mittere alone will surface too broad a range of Latin texts. Researchers should search the specific compound phrases.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary source dictionary for this entry and provides the essential phrase inventory: mittere in confusum, nec super eum mittemus, and the conveyancing formula. Burrill's treatment is appropriately compact — mittere is a building-block term, not a doctrine — but the cross-references are substantive and direct the researcher to the correct primary authorities.
What Burrill does not provide is any synthesis of how the constitutional phrase from Magna Carta was interpreted across different periods. The entry gestures toward that history through the citation to Reeves but does not develop it. Researchers should not treat Burrill's entry as a complete account of the constitutional significance of nec super eum mittemus; Coke's Second Institutes and the secondary literature on Magna Carta interpretation are necessary supplements.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionary sources on the core meanings of the term. The Latin is stable; the interpretive weight rests in the phrases, not in the word itself.
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Jurisdictional Note
The constitutional phrase nec super eum mittemus derives from English law and carries its primary interpretive significance in the English common law tradition and in American constitutional history as part of the lineage of due process. It has no direct equivalent in civil law jurisdictions. Modern civilian systems do not use or interpret this phrase.
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