Definition
A Latin term meaning to hurt, harm, or damage; to offend or annoy; or to produce an inconvenience. In classical legal Latin, nocere refers to the act of causing injury or detriment, and is properly applied to the conduct of persons rather than to abstract conditions or things. It functions primarily as a conceptual root in Latin maxims and legal formulations rather than as a standalone operative term in modern legal proceedings.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Nocere is not a standard entry in contemporary English dictionaries; it is a Latin verb meaning "to harm" or "to hurt," most familiar to English speakers through the medical maxim primum non nocere ("first, do no harm").
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English word. Recognized in learned usage as Latin for "to injure" or "to be harmful."
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow in one sense — both track the Latin root faithfully — but the legal context matters: in legal sources, nocere carries a technical weight tied to actionable harm and the capacity of persons to cause legally cognizable injury, distinct from mere physical hurt in ordinary speech.
Common Confusion
Nocere is closely associated with, but distinct from, damnum (loss or damage to property or interests) and injuria (a legal wrong or unlawful act). Burrill distinguishes nocere as properly applied to persons as the agents of harm, while damnum refers to the resulting loss and injuria to the legal wrong itself. Researchers encountering nocere in Latin maxims should resist collapsing it into either of those terms; each occupies a different analytical position in the classical taxonomy of civil liability.
Why It Matters in Research
Nocere surfaces most often in Latin legal maxims embedded in older common law and civil law treatises rather than in operative statutory or case text. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus should treat it as a doctrinal signpost: when a maxim employs nocere, it is typically making a claim about personal agency in causing harm — who acted, and whether that act crossed from permissible conduct into actionable injury.
The term appears in formulations concerning nuisance (the neighbor who uses property so as to nocere others), in tort theory distinguishing passive conditions from active wrongdoing, and in civilian doctrine tracing liability back to the actor's capacity to cause harm. Because it is a Latin verb rather than a defined legal term, it will not appear in indexes or headnotes of modern reporters; researchers must search for it within treatise text and annotations.
Historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus vary in how explicitly they connect nocere to actionable doctrine. Some treat it as purely grammatical vocabulary for reading Latin sources; others, like Burrill, hint at its doctrinal function by pairing it with damnum dare and incommodum adferre, signaling a graduated scale from serious harm to mere inconvenience. That gradation is worth tracking in any research project touching on threshold-of-harm questions in nuisance or early tort law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill defines nocere as covering a range from serious hurt down to inconvenience, citing Calvin's Lexicon (Calv. Lex.) for the paired Latin glosses damnum dare (to give loss) and incommodum adferre (to bring inconvenience). His editorial note — that nocere is "properly applied to persons" — reflects the classical civilian concern with distinguishing personal agency from impersonal causation, a distinction that matters for assigning fault.
What Burrill and comparable historical sources do not do is map nocere onto specific common law causes of action. The term is presented as conceptual vocabulary, not as an element of any pleading. Researchers should not expect to find nocere functioning as a technical term of art in the same way that, say, malice or consideration does in English common law doctrine; it remains infrastructure — the Latin substrate on which maxims and civilian arguments are built.
Jurisdictional Note
Because nocere operates at the level of Latin legal vocabulary rather than as a defined term in any particular jurisdiction's statutes or case law, jurisdictional variation is not directly applicable. Its significance shifts between common law and civil law traditions: civil law systems, drawing more directly on Roman sources, will deploy nocere and its cognate maxims more explicitly in doctrinal analysis than common law jurisdictions, where the term appears mainly in academic commentary and historical treatises.