Definition
A Latin-French legal term meaning "let us suppose," "put the case," or "admit." Used as a hypothetical marker in legal discourse and pleading, mittomus introduces a proposition assumed for the sake of argument — an admitted or supposed fact upon which reasoning or legal analysis then proceeds. It functions as a term of concession or supposition, equivalent to saying "granting that" or "assuming for the moment."
Common Confusion
Mittomus should not be confused with mittimus, a distinct legal term referring to a writ committing a person to custody. The terms are unrelated in meaning and origin. The similarity in spelling and their shared Latin-French lineage makes conflation easy, particularly when reading historical manuscripts or older printed reports where spelling was inconsistent. A researcher encountering either term in a historical source should read carefully before concluding which word appears.
Why It Matters in Research
Mittomus is a rare term with an extremely narrow footprint in the modern corpus. Researchers are most likely to encounter it when working through early common law treatises, Year Books, or works deriving from Littleton's Tenures — the source Burrill cites. In those contexts, the term signals that what follows is a hypothetical or conceded premise, not an established fact. Failing to recognize this can distort a reader's understanding of the argument structure: an author using mittomus is not asserting a fact but reasoning through a supposition.
The term's importance is less definitional than structural. When parsing a dense passage of early common law reasoning, recognizing mittomus as a logical marker — rather than a procedural or substantive term — keeps the reader oriented within the argument.
Because the term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern sources, it will rarely if ever appear in modern case law or secondary literature without annotation. Researchers working in digitized historical corpora should note that OCR errors and variant spellings (mittimus, mittemus, and similar forms) may produce false matches or missed hits. Manual verification against the original text is advisable.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind shelf for this term. Burrill identifies it as Latin-French (L. Fr.), derived from mitter, and supplies the three English equivalents: "let us suppose," "put the case," and "admit." The citation to Littleton's Tenures, section 302, grounds the term specifically in property law reasoning — Littleton uses this mode of suppositious argument to walk through hypotheticals about tenures and conditions.
No broader historical dictionary coverage appears in the available sources. The term's absence from other historical law dictionaries is itself informative: mittomus was evidently too technical and too closely associated with a specific register of early legal argumentation to warrant independent treatment beyond specialist glossaries. Its life in legal literature is essentially tied to the Littleton tradition and the commentators who followed it.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs to the historical common law tradition. It has no recognized modern jurisdictional application and does not appear as an operative term in contemporary English or American law.