Definition
"Mul" does not appear to function as a standalone legal term with settled doctrinal meaning. The single passage recovered from Burrill's Law Dictionary under this heading is a fragment — almost certainly a printing artifact, a catchword, or an indexing stub — that breaks off mid-sentence during a discussion of motive, inducement, and the distinction between interior and exterior motives in the context of judicial evidence. The fragment draws on Bentham's *Rationale of Judicial Evidence* and concerns the psychology of volition as it bears on legal proof, but the headword "MUL" itself does not correspond to a recognized legal concept in that passage.
No independent legal definition for "mul" as a term of art has been identified in the available sources.
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Common Confusion
Do not conflate this apparent stub entry with any of the following terms, each of which has independent doctrinal content:
**MULCT** — a fine, penalty, or pecuniary punishment; also used as a verb meaning to punish by fine. Appears in Roman law sources and persists into early American usage.
**MULIER** — in historical English common law, the legitimate child of a subsequently married couple, relevant to questions of inheritance and bastardy. Contrasted with the "bastard eigne" in land law disputes.
**MULTIPLICITY** — in equity and civil procedure, the undesirable proliferation of suits arising from the same subject matter; a basis for equitable intervention.
If your research led you to this entry in search of one of these terms, redirect accordingly.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "MUL" as a headword or entry stub in historical legal dictionaries should treat it with caution. Several possibilities account for the appearance:
**Catchword artifact.** Older legal dictionaries — including Burrill's — were set in type using catchwords at page headers or column breaks. A term appearing in isolation at the top of a column may reflect the printer's running head for a word that begins on the preceding page, not a self-contained defined term. This is the most probable explanation here.
**Truncated entry.** The text recovered under this heading is the tail end of an entry for a different term — most likely MOTIVE, given the subject matter (interior vs. exterior motive, Bentham's taxonomy of inducements). If your research purpose is understanding the historical treatment of motive in evidentiary theory, navigate directly to the MOTIVE entry rather than this fragment.
**Indexing or OCR error.** Digitized historical dictionaries frequently generate phantom headwords from page breaks, hyphenation, or optical character recognition failures. "MUL" could be the OCR rendering of a hyphenated word (e.g., "MUL-" as the first syllable of MULCT, MULIER, or similar) rather than a discrete entry.
If you are tracing a specific term beginning with "MUL" — such as MULCT (a fine or penalty), MULIER (a term from historical English family law denoting a legitimate child as distinguished from a bastard), or MULTIPLICITY (of suits) — each of those has substantive doctrinal content and should be searched directly.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source available for this entry, and the passage it supplies is not definitional. It describes the distinction Bentham drew between what he called the *exterior* or *external* motive — the ultimate object or inducement that tempts the mind to act — and the *interior* or *internal* motive — the desire or passion that the exterior motive creates. This is a fragment from a longer treatment of motive as an element of legal proof and culpability, drawn from Bentham's *Rationale of Judicial Evidence*, Book III. The passage adds nothing to the definition of "MUL" because "MUL" is almost certainly not the intended headword for that discussion.
No other historical legal dictionary in the available corpus supplies a definition for this term as a standalone legal concept.
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